Two minor daughters urge PM Modi to free separatist

Srinagar: Two minor daughters of a jailed Kashmiri separatist leader Shahid-ul-Islam have sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention towards his release on the plea that “none of the allegations levelled against him having been proved.”

Aftab Hilali Shah aka Shahid-ul-Islam, a close aide of Kashmir’s chief Muslim cleric and separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, is among about a dozen prominent separatists arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) last year on various charges including alleged funding for terror and subversive activities in the Valley.

He is presently lodged in Delhi’s Tihar jail. The NIA had in January this year filed a chargesheet in a special court in New Delhi’s Patiala House Court Complex against Shahid-ul-Islam and eleven others, including amir of chief of Jama’at-ud-Da’wah, Hafiz Saeed, and Hizb-ul-Mujahedin ‘supreme commander’ Muhammad Yusuf Shah alias Syed Salahuddin, saying they hatched “conspiring to wage war” against the government by carrying out “secessionist activities” in Jammu and Kashmir.

But Shahid-ul-Islam’s daughters Suzanne Shah and Sundas Shah have in a letter to the Prime Minister said that the NIA has failed to prove the charges against their father. They have sought Mr Modi’s “immediate personal intervention” to ensure justice is delivered to the family.

The letter, copies of which were released to the media here on Wednesday, claims that Shahid-ul-Islami is languishing in a 8x6 feet cell of high-risk ward of Tihar Jail for past many months and has been kept “with criminals and drug addicts,” which “exposes him to obvious threat to his life”.

Recounting a recent meeting with their father in prison, Suzanne and Sundas who study at Srinagar’s Christian missionary Presentation Convent School, have said they could barely recognise him.