Their Kashmiri tag spelt prison term, anguish

Mohd Ismail (35), Fazal Hussain (25), Shoukat Hussain (21), Abdul Rasheed (34), Mohd Rasheed (40), Javed Iqbal (26), Abdul Shakoor (25) and Abudul Hameed (32), all belonging to Sangla and Gunthal villages of Surankot region of Poonch district in Jammu and Kashmir, had to move out of their region to escape poverty, hunger, pressure from the police and persecution by armed militants. The youths decided to try out their luck in theSouth and so set out on their journey at the start of the Ramzan month.

After a stop-over at Delhi and Bhopal, they landed in Hyderabad on December 30. They took shelter at Mecca mosque near the historic Charminar that night and left for Nizamabad the next day.

They reached here in the early hours of January 1 and were inquiring about the locations of mosques when a routine night vigil police team spotted them at Ahmedipur locality. When they failed to give satisfactory replies, the Kashmiri youths were herded into a police station for questioning and thus began their agony.

During the course of interrogation, the Kashmiris told the police that they came here to collect donations for construction of a mosque at Surankot and produced some evidences to substantiate their claim. At one stage, they even told the police that they had come to collect alms during the Ramzan month. This made the police officials suspicious as they wondered why such able-bodied Kashmiris should travel all the way for a singlepurpose.

Ironically, their arrest coincided with the visit of Union Minister of State for Home Ch Vidyasagar Rao to the district. The Home Minister, at a press conference, said that several Pakistani nationals were overstaying in the district and it is turning out to be a safe haven for Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to carry out its subversive activities.

The local press carried the statement prominently and regional newspapers vied with each other in churning out about the arrest of Kashmiri youths. A Telugu newspaper even went to the extent of linking them to ISI and termed them "ISI agents who arrived here to create subversive activities". It so happened that on earlier occasions, the intelligence agencies had warned the law and order authorities that some fundamentalist outfits were trying to get a foothold in Nizamabad and other Telangana districts. Last year, police even received conclusive evidence that Azam Ghouri, a top ranking leader of the Lashkar-e-Toiba was spotted in theregion.