SRINAGAR: Senior separatist leader and chairman of pro-Independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, Mohammad Yasin Malik has condemned the arrest and slapping of the Public Safety Act on his colleague.
Zahoor Ahmad Bhat was arrested a few days ago and has been shifted to sub-Jail Hira Nagar in Jammu, a local news agency, KNS reports.
Mr Bhat is the brother of JKLF founder, Maqbool Bhat, hanged in Delhi’s Tihar jail in the eighties.
The PSA provides for detention without trial for three months.
Mr Malik condemned his arrest saying rulers “who always portray themselves as democrats have actually used arrests and black laws to suppress the voices of freedom and resistance”.
He said “a family which sacrificed their four sons during freedom struggle cannot be frightened by measures like these.”
“Jails, tortures and sufferings are a part of struggle. JKLF and its leadership have suffered because of these oppressive measures, but have not and will never shun its path of truth and rightness,” Mr Malik said in a statement.
He said JKLF stands by the family of Zahoor Ahmad Bhat in this hour of suffering and hopes that this “black period” will end and the “chains of slavery and prisons will break soon”.
