When the Special TADA Court here Tuesday ordered the release of a Srinagar resident, held a day earlier, in connection with the 1989 abduction of Rubaiya Sayeed, it also quashed arrest warrants against seven others in the case.
Ordering the release of Shafat Ahmad Shangloo, 3rd Additional Sessions Judge Madan Lal, who is the Presiding Officer of the Special TADA Court, said Shangloo’s name had been “inadvertently or mistakenly listed”.
Sources attributed the embarrassment faced by the CBI over the much-touted arrest, which blew up within a day, to its eagerness to track absconding accused in the case, with a trial court likely to begin recording of the prosecution evidence from Saturday.
Sayeed, daughter of the then Union home minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, was abducted from Srinagar on December 8, 1989. She was released after five days, when the then V P Singh government at the Centre, which was supported by the BJP, released five terrorists of the banned Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in exchange.
In its chargesheet filed on September 18, 1990, the CBI named over 15 people, including JKLF chief Yasin Malik. The chargesheet also had names separately of the “absconders”, and the accused who were not sent for trial. Shangloo figured among the persons who were released for want of evidence.
In August 2019, in pursuance of a 28-year-old court order – dated September 17, 1991 – a general warrant of arrest was issued against alleged absconders Miss Halima, Javed Iqbal Mir, Mohammad Yaqoob Pandit, Javed Ahmed Mir and Ghulam Mohammad Taploo. The court was told that another alleged absconder, Salim alias Nana ji, had been taken into custody.
On Tuesday, the Special TADA Court referred to this warrant of arrest, and said it “clearly names five persons’’ and that “the name of the arrested accused (Shangloo) is not in the list”.
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Presiding Officer Madan Lal also noted that Shangloo had been released in the case earlier for want of evidence, and hence the court had “very wisely” not named him in its September 1991 order. His release due to lack of evidence against him was also cited by Shangloo’s lawyers in his defence.
The TADA judge also noted that the chargesheet filed in September 1990 against Yasin Malik and others talked about a general warrant of arrest against seven others (separate from the five named later in the 2019 order) – Riaz Ahmed, Khurshid Ahmed Dar, Tari Ahmed, Nissar Ahmed Bhat, Manzoor Ahmed, Nanaji and Abdul Majid Bhat.
The judge then went on to order the cancellation of the warrant arrest issued against them as well, “to avoid unnecessary exercise by the CBI and hardship & stigma of arrest”, while noting that their names were not in the original order.
Of the 15 chargesheeted, the case saw the framing of charges in January 2021 against 10 people, including Malik.
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Of them, four including Malik, Mohammad Zaman Mir, Mehraj-ud-Din Sheikh, and Manzoor Ahmed Sofi have been identified by Rubaiya Sayeed. The other six are Ali Mohammad Mir, Iqbal Ahmad Gandroo, Javed Ahmad Mir alias Nalka, Mohammad Rafiq Pahloo alias Nana Ji alias Saleem, Wajahat Bashir and Showkat Ahmad Bakshi.
