Separatist Arrested in India
A leading Indian Kashmiri separatist leader has been detained under a tough new anti-terrorist law over allegations of funding “terrorist organizations,” police said Sunday.
Police seized Syed Ali Shah Geelani at his house in Srinagar, summer capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The Kashmir region is at the root of a standoff between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.
Geelani, 72, is a former head of the All Party Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, an alliance of separatist groups in the Himalayan state, where a revolt against Indian rule has raged for more than a dozen years.
Hurriyat denounced Geelani’s detention as a move to “derail the ongoing peace process” between India and Pakistan and called a general strike for Tuesday.
Geelani, who was taken to a jail in Ranchi in the eastern state of Bihar, said he did not know why he had been detained. The leader said he had been striving to defuse tension between India and Pakistan.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry condemned the arrest, saying it showed India’s disregard for civil liberties.
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