Senior separatist leaders arrested in Srinagar

Senior separatist leaders Shabir Ahmad Shah, Muhammad Nayeem Khan and Mushtaq-ul-Islam here Friday after organising a seminar in remembrance of JKLF founder Muhammad Maqbool Bhat and parliament attack convict Afzal Guru in a hotel here, police said,

As these separatist leaders came out of the hotel in city centre Lal Chowk after the event, police took them into custody and took them to the nearby Kothibagh police station.

The seminar had been organized to remember the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) founder Bhat, who has hanged in Delhi's Tihar Jail Feb 11, 1984 and Guru, who was executed in the same jail Feb 9, 2013.

A senior police officer said the separatist leaders had been taken into preventive custody to maintain law and order in the city.

All separatist groups have called for a protest shutdown on Feb 9 and Feb 11 to mount pressure on the state and the central governments to return the mortal remains of Bhat and Guru to their family.

Both Bhat and Guru had been buried inside the Tihar Jail in Delhi.

Shah, Khan, Mushtaq-ul-Islam and another senior separatist leader, Azam Inquilabi broke away from the moderate Hurriyat group headed by Mirwaiz Umer Farooq last year and formed their own separatist conglomerate known as the Hurriyat Conference Jammu and Kashmir (HCJK).