SRINAGAR: India’s top counter-terrorism investigation agency on Friday again demanded the death penalty for Kashmiri freedom fighter Muhammad Yasin Malik after he was sentenced to life imprisonment, official sources said.
Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chief Muhammad Yasin Malik, 57, pleaded guilty last year to financing terrorism after refusing to accept a government-appointed lawyer or defend himself against the charges. What did
The court rejected the National Investigation Agency’s plea for the death penalty, saying the death penalty is for a crime that “shocks the collective consciousness” of society.
A senior security official in Indian-administered Kashmir told JEE News that on Friday, the NIA again appealed to the High Court in New Delhi to impose the death penalty for the country. Legal news website Bar & Bench reported that the petition is scheduled for hearing on Monday.
The country’s JKLF led an armed independence movement in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1989. India responded with a massive military campaign and tens of thousands of civilians, soldiers and militants were killed in the conflict.
Malik renounced violence in 1994 to peacefully campaign for independence, meeting Indian leaders, including two prime ministers, in the following years. He was jailed repeatedly, spent 14 years in jail where he claimed he was tortured, and was finally arrested in 2018, months before New Delhi ordered the area Abolition of semi-autonomy led to several months of lockdown and communication blackouts. Tensions have since risen in the Muslim-majority region, with many Hindu nationalists accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of seeking to alter the demographic balance.
Malik rose to prominence in 1990 when his group kidnapped the daughter of India’s home minister and released her in exchange for five accomplices from Indian jails.
