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A former Jammu and Kashmir minister who had been evading arrest for the past nine days in a hawala case was apprehended on Sunday from Kathua district’s Keerian Gandiyal area bordering Punjab, the police said.
Jatinder Singh alias Babu Singh, who was arrested from a relative’s house, had been on the run since his name surfaced in the hawala case following the arrest in Jammu of Mohammad Shareef Shah, of Syed Pora in Anantnag’s Kokernag area, on March 31.
From the 64-year-old Shah, the police allegedly seized Rs 6.9 lakh in hawala money meant to fund “subversive activities’’ in the otherwise-peaceful Jammu region.
According to the police, Shah had been tasked by Jatinder Singh to collect money from one Omer at Srinagar.
However, he got caught with the money when he came to Jammu. Shah has local and foreign associates including Javed and Khatib, both residents of Pakistan occupied Kashmir, and Farooq Khan, of Toronto, the police added.
The police further said Shah was the admin of a WhatsApp group that also had Pakistani and Saudi nationals as members.
Three more people—S Gurdev Singh and Mohammad Sharief Sartaj, both residents of Jammu, and Sidhant Sharma, of Kathua—have been detained for questioning in the case.
Jatinder Singh won the 2002 Assembly election from Kathua as an independent but later joined the Congress and became a minister in Mufti Sayeed’s PDP-Congress government. After the government fell following the PDP’s withdrawal of support, he floated his own party—the Nature, Mankind-Friendly Global Party.
He was a strong opponent to giving a free hand to security forces in Kashmir and believed that the problem could be solved only through trilateral talks between India, Pakistan and the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
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