New Delhi wants to ‘eliminate Geelani on Yasir Arafat-pattern’: Hurriyat (G)

The Hurriyat Conference (G) Chairman Syed Ali Geelani—who continues to be under house detention—was again barred from offering Friday prayers, a party spokesman said.

“GeelaniSahaib, despite being unwell, continued to remain under house detention and was once again unable to offer the Friday prayers. The process of his illegal house detention started in 2010 and continues till date. The government is silent as to how long will this extraordinary imprisonment continue,” the Hurriyat (G) spokesman Ayaz Akbar said in a statement.

He said the main reason of Geelani’s ill-health is his continuous house detention. “This way the government wants to eliminate him in a slow death (sic). The Government of India is following the footprints of Israeli government and wants to ‘eliminate’ GeelaniSahab just like the Palestine leader Yasir Arafat was killed, but they don’t want to take the blame; that’s why the government hasn’t produced any written order on the house imprisonment of GeelaniSahab for the past five years and officials sometimes don’t even hesitate in telling the white lie that GeelaniSahab is a ‘Free Man’ and not under house arrest,” Akbar alleged.

“Prominent doctors have also said that restrictions on movement of GeelaniSahab are taking a heavy toll on his health and his continuous confinement to the four walls of his house is making him weak day by day and the immune system of his body is also getting badly affected by this,” the spokesman said. “This opinion of doctors has been published by some prominent newspapers which generated a hope that the government will end the house imprisonment of GeelaniSahab and the police force deployed at his residence will be removed. But nothing like that happened and despite being ill from last two weeks, GeelaniSahab continues to remain under detention.”

The spokesman cautioned that if anything untoward happened to GeelaniSahab, “it will have serious consequences and all its responsibility will be on the Indian government, their ‘local agents’ and the Jammu & Kashmir police who all are responsible for his ‘illegal’ detention.”

The spokesman appealed to local and international human rights organization to take serious note of the continuous imprisonment of Geelani and put pressure on the Indian government to “stop playing with the life of the pro-freedom leader.”

Meanwhile, people at PanthaChowk here held peaceful protest demonstration after Friday prayers against slapping of PSA on Tehreek-e-Hurriyat leader Mehraj-ud-din Rubanni who used to lead Friday prayers at PanthachowkJamia Masjid, a spokesman of TeH said.