TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
NEW DELHI: In an operation shrouded in secrecy, 45-year-old Kashmiri militant Mohammad Afzal Guru, was hanged in Tihar Jails here shortly before 6 am on Saturday, six days after his final clemency plea was rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee last Sunday.
He has been on the death row for over 10 years since after conviction in the abortive Indian Parliament attack in December 2001 that left 14, including all five terrorists, dead.
Officially, the time of hanging was given as 8 am, but Delhi University professor SAR Geelani, who was acquitted in the case after the trial court sentenced him also to death, somehow got the hanging information from some jail inmate and rang up Afzal’s wife in Kashmir at 6.30 am to convey the news.
Afzal, who kept denying his hand in plotting the Parliament attack, was buried near Jail No 3, close to the grave of another Kashmiri Maqbool Butt, founder of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, hanged on February 11, 1984. It was the same pattern decided by the government as in the case of 26/11 Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab buried in Pune’s Yerwada jail soon after his execution on November 21.
Union Home Secretary RK Singh, who broke the news of the hanging, said Afzal’s body was buried in Tihar Jails itself in accordance with the rituals instead of handing it over to his relatives to avoid any law and order problem.
A curfew was also clamped across Kashmir valley on Saturday as the state government was alerted about the hanging only Friday evening to take the precautionary measures.
Moderate faction of Hurriyat Conference led by Mirwaiz Umer Farooq declared a 4-day mourning on hanging of Afzal and sought immediate return of his mortal remains to give a burial as per Islamic rituals according to his family’s wishes.
Farooq, who was in the capital, as also hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani, were put under house arrest at their residences here in an early morning swoop. Geelani’s journalist son-in-law Iftikhar Gilani and his wife Aneesa were also forcibly taken to his house and told to stay indoors by Delhi Police special cell personnel but were allowed to leave after strong protests.
The Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence on Afzal back in 2003, but his hanging remained pending all these years, prompting main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party accusing the Congress-led UPA government of leniency with the political motive of Muslim appeasement in delaying the hanging.
Afzal Guru was tried and convicted under the now withdrawn Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) as also for waging war against the state among other terror charges.
Dead men leave no tales behind but Afzal Guru made the wild charge ~ which once the legal process was completed can only be termed his attempt to create an alibi and/or deflect attention ~ of the “J&K Police, Intelligence Bureau and Delhi Police Special Cell” being behind the Parliament attack plot. He had claimed he became a “victim of their stick-and-carrot policy”. He even named a DSP of the Special Task Force (STF), a crack police force of J&K Police now known as Special Operation Group (SOG), as the alleged handler of the terrorists who stormed the Parliament House on December 13, 2001. The Supreme Court after due process rejected his plea outright that he was made a scapegoat for the conspiracy hatched by the police officer. He repeatedly wanted records of his own mobile phone checked to see how many times the officer called up on his trip from Srinagar to Delhi when he was forced to escort to Delhi and get accommodation and a vehicle to one of the terrorists killed in the attack. In his mercy petition to the President also, he had alleged that he was “entrapped (in the case) by corrupt officers of STF.”
His hanging remains controversial also because the evidence that was used to secure his conviction has been questioned in some quarters. Some even alleged that in the absence of the real conspirators, the investigating agencies made a scapegoat out of Guru. However the courts rejected these allegations and pronounced him guilty. Executions have become very rare in India as Afzal’s is only the second since 2004 after the hanging of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving attacker of the 2008 Mumbai attack, at Pune in November.
The hanging revives the memories of India pointing to Pakistan-backed Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) behind the attack on Parliament that led to a nosedive in relations between the two countries with both sides amassing troops along the border in what appeared in 2002 to be leading towards an imminent outbreak of hostilities before the situation cooled down. Afzal, who had surrendered as a militant after some training in Pakistan, was in the process of setting up his own medical shop in Kashmir when he was arrested and held guilty of arranging weapons for the attackers and being a member of the banned JeM.
