Delhi court orders attachment of Hurriyat’s Srinagar headquarters

Srinagar: In a terror funding case filed against the Kashmiri separatist leader Nayeem Khan and others under different provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a designated court for the National Investigation Agency (NIA) cases in New Delhi has on Saturday ordered attachment of the building housing the headquarters of the Hurriyat Conference in Srinagar.

Arrested on 24 July 2017, the National Front chief Khan is facing charges of involvement in terrorism and terror funding along with a number of his separatist associates. The so-called ‘All-parties Hurriyat Conference’ is a conglomerate of nearly 30 constituents including the NF. Some of its constituents, including Yasin Malik’s Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), were banned after a car bomb explosion that killed 40 CRPF personnel in February 2019.

Among the accused, Yasin Malik has been sentenced to life imprisonment after he pleaded guilty to the charges levelled against him. Outlawed Dukhtaraan-e-Millat supremo Asiya Andrabi has been acquitted but the NIA has filed an appeal against the court order. All others detained by the agency, including Khan, are contesting the charges.

Additional Sessions Judge Shailender Malik of Patiala House Courts on Saturday passed the order on NIA’s plea under section 33(1) of UAPA to attach the Hurriyat office at Rajbagh, in Srinagar. “In view of the above reasons, the immovable property i.e. building office of All Parties Hurriyat Conference situated at Raj Bagh, Srinagar which was earlier used as an office of APHC is ordered to be attached. Necessary legal process be carried out in this regard,” the court ordered.

The NIA told the court that the property was partly owned by Khan and his associates. The office situated at Rajbagh was used to strategize different protests, funding activities of stone pelting on security forces, recruiting unemployed youths to carry out “unlawful activities as well as terrorist activities” to create unrest in Jammu and Kashmir to wage war against the Government of India, NIA contended. The Defence counsels maintained that the office was “only partly owned by him” whereas other co-owners were not given any notice before the order of attachment. The court held that Khan’s associates too, who were affiliated with the Hurriyat office, were also facing prosecution in the same matter.

According to the court, the evidence collected during the investigation was duly examined at the stage of framing of charge by a predecessor court which concluded to frame charges against Khan and other accused persons. “In that process it is needless to observe that in case any other person who claims to be co-owner and considers that such process of attachment is not proper, can avail legal right in accordance with law,” the court said.

The court noted that attachment of a property in itself did not amount to any bearing upon the trial and that it cannot be in any manner considered as “pre-trial conclusion” or findings of punishment or offence against the accused. It pointed out that section 33 of UAPA did not hinder the powers of court to attach any such property which may be partly owned by the accused.

“In such situation taking into consideration the serious nature of the allegations as against A-5 itself (Khan), the fact that he is part owner of the property in question, cannot be a reason for not attaching the property when it is not even made clear as to who others were co-owners of that property,” the court said.

According to the residents, around 25 years back, Hurriyat had hired a two-storey building at Rajbagh, Srinagar, for its headquarters. It originally belonged to a National Conference leader and Forest lessee from Doda whose brother, a Congress leader, later functioned as a Minister in Mufti Sayeed’s and Ghulam Nabi Azad’s PDP-Congress government in 2002-2007. Its subsequent deeds were not immediately known.

The NIA registered the FIR in May 2017 on a complaint by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, under Sections 120B, 121, 121A and 124 A of the Indian Penal Code and sections 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 39 and 40 of Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967. It alleged on the basis of a“secret information” that the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyiba chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and various separatist leaders, including the members of the Hurriyat Conference, were raising funds through hawala and they had also entered into a conspiracy to cause violence in Kashmir.

It alleged that there was a larger criminal conspiracy for causing disruption in the Kashmir valley by way of “pelting stones on the security forces, systematically burning of schools, damage to public property and for waging war against India”.

While most of the accused have been arrested and some have died in different encounters, LeT supremo Hafiz Saeed, Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar and the Hizbul Mujahideen ‘supreme commander’ and the United Jihad Council chairman Salahuddin are operating from Pakistan. It is for the first time that an Indian court has ordered the attachment of the headquarters of the Hurriyat Conference which, for a decade operated an office in New Delhi, and which has not been banned any time since it was launched in 1993.

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