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India Official’s Daughter Freed in Deal on Prisoners

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From Associated Press

Muslim separatists freed the daughter of a Cabinet minister Wednesday after the government released five of their jailed comrades, officials said.

Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, was taken to a friend’s home in this northern city two hours after the militants were freed downtown, police said.

Rubaiya Sayeed, 22, was flown to New Delhi later and met at the airport by her father, mother, brother and sister.

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Young Muslim men celebrated the militants’ release by shooting off firecrackers in Srinagar, summer capital of India’s northernmost state of Jammu and Kashmir, which borders Pakistan.

About 3,000 people shouted anti-India slogans and waved the national flag of Pakistan, which has fought three wars with India over Kashmir since both nations gained independence from Britain in 1947. A cease-fire line monitored by the United Nations separates the state into Indian and Pakistani territory.

Rubaiya Sayeed was abducted at gunpoint Friday as she was going home from her job at a Srinagar hospital.

The Kashmir Liberation Front, which demands secession from India of the mainly Muslim state, claimed responsibility for the abduction. Its chairman said the group might try other kidnapings in its campaign against the Hindu-dominated government.

The kidnapers had threatened to kill their captive if their colleagues were not freed.

Sayeed is the first Muslim to head the Home Ministry, which is in charge of internal security. The appointment was seen as part of Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s efforts to appease Muslims, who bore the brunt of Hindu-Muslim riots that claimed more than 300 lives this fall.

The kidnaping was the first crisis for Singh, a Hindu who took office Dec. 2.

Sayeed said that solving the militant campaign in Jammu and Kashmir is the government’s “No. 1 priority program.”

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“There is a complete collapse of law and order in the state,” he said.

The freed militants included Abdul Hamid Sheik, a top leader of the Kashmir Liberation Front. Sheik, who was wounded in a clash with police last month and arrested, was taken by ambulance from a Srinagar hospital and handed over to his organization.

The Kashmir Liberation Front, formed in 1965, wants Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, to become independent or part of predominantly Muslim Pakistan.

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