Separatist leaders taken into custody
MALIK DETAINED TO STOP HIM FROM TAKING OUT PROTEST MARCH IN SRINAGAR
Authorities yesterday placed senior separatist leaders under detention in Jammu & Kashmir capital Srinagar to prevent their participation in a protest shutdown that derailed life in the Kashmir Valley.
Police took Mohammad Yasin Malik, Chairman of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), into preventive custody here to stop him from taking out a protest march in the city.
Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Syed Ali Geelani were also placed under house arrest at their residences on the outskirts of Srinagar.
The Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL), a grouping of separatists headed by Geelani, Mirwaiz Farooq and Malik, called for the shutdown against the killing of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari and continuing killings of civilians in Kashmir.
Bukhari, editor of Rising Kashmir newspaper, was shot dead along with two security guards in Srinagar on June 14.
Shops, public transport, other businesses and educational institutions remained shut yesterday at most places in Srinagar while attendance in banks, post offices and government offices was thin due to non-availability of public transport.
Private transport and some three-wheelers, however, plied in uptown areas of Srinagar.
Taxis, buses plying
Taxis and buses carrying tourists to Sonamarg, Pahalgam and Gulmarg hill stations operated as usual. Train services were suspended in the Kashmir Valley as a precautionary measure.
No incident of stone pelting was reported in the Valley.
The shutdown also derailed normal life in all other major cities and towns of the Valley, where a separatist campaign has been raging since 1989.
Despite the shutdown, Governor N.N. Vohra and all senior bureaucrats of the state government attended their offices in the Srinagar Civil Secretariat yesterday.
Vohra had on Wednesday also visited the Civil Secretariat and was presented a guard of honour by police, though June 20 was a public holiday in the Valley on account of the annual festival at the Mata Kheer Bhawani shrine, a holy day for Kashmiri Pandits.