New Delhi/Srinagar: After 36 years, the CBI on Monday arrested a person in connection with the sensational 1989 kidnapping of Rubaiyya Sayeed, the daughter of the then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, for allegedly being part of a conspiracy hatched by members of the banned JKLF terror group.
The person, identified as Shafat Ahmed Shanglu, is alleged to be a close confidant of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chief Yasin Malik.
According to officials, Shafat was allegedly an office-bearer of the JKLF and was handling the outfit’s finances.
The CBI, along with the Jammu and Kashmir Police, arrested Sahafat from his residence in the Nishat area in Srinagar after following the due legal process, the officials said.
Malik, who has been attending the court hearings through video-conferencing, has been identified by eyewitnesses, including Sayeed.
Malik, who is lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail serving a jail term in a terror financing case, is not produced in the court physically due to a Ministry of Home Affairs order restricting his movement.
During the court hearings, Rubaiyya Sayeed had identified four other accused besides Malik of being involved in her kidnapping.
She was abducted from near Lal Ded Hospital in Srinagar on December 8, 1989, and was freed five days later after the then V P Singh government, which was supported by the BJP, at the Centre released five terrorists in exchange.
Now living in Tamil Nadu, Rubaiyya Sayeed is listed as a prosecution witness by the CBI, which took over the case in early 1990.
Malik, 56, was sentenced by a special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in May last year. He was arrested in early 2019 in connection with the 2017 terror financing case registered by the NIA.
In order to expedite the trial, the CBI had appointed its senior counsel Monika Kohli as the chief prosecutor after framing charges against Malik in the much-publicised cases related to the Sayeed’s abduction and killing of four IAF personnel in Srinagar more than three decades ago.
Kohli has been representing the CBI as a retainer counsel in the High Court for the last one decade and had opposed bail to Malik in the two sensational cases which had taken place in 1989-90 when militancy broke out in the valley.
A special TADA court has already framed charges against Malik and nine others in the kidnapping case of Sayeed. (With PTI Inputs)
