CBI Takes Ex-JKLF Activist Into Custody in 1989 Rubaiya Sayeed Kidnapping Case

Srinagar: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday took a former Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) activist into custody in connection with the 1989 kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the then Union Home Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed.

The individual, Shafat Ahmad Shangloo, a resident of Srinagar’s Ishber Nishat quarter, was picked up by the CBI team. It is not immediately clear whether he has been formally arrested or detained for questioning to advance the investigation.

According to sources, Shangloo was initially summoned to a local police station, following which CBI officials took him into their custody. The development is part of the agency’s continuing probe into the high-profile case with the trial commencing in 1990. In recent years, the CBI has examined several accused persons as the trial proceeds before a designated TADA court in Jammu.

Ms. Rubaiya, then 23 years old and doing medical internship at Srinagar’s government-run Lala Dev Memorial Women’s Hospital, was waylaid by the JKLF cadres while she was returning home in a minibus on December 8, 1989. Her father Mufti Sayeed was serving as India’s first Muslim home minister in the Janata Dal government headed by V.P. Singh.

After days of negotiations between the captors and the Central government’s official mediators and some family friends of the Muftis, she was swapped with five jailed members of the JKLF on the December 13, 1989 evening.

She had in July 2022 while testifying before the court as a prosecution witness identified JKLF leader Muhammad Yasin Malik as one of her abductors. On February 24, 2023, a prosecution witness also identified Malik and another accused Mohammad Zaman as kidnappers of Ms. Rubaiya during the hearing of the case in the special court in Jammu. The prosecution had said that the eyewitness corroborated that he had gone to Sopore, a town 48-km northwest of J&K’s summer capital Srinagar, at the time of Ms. Rubaiya’s kidnapping and identified the place and persons connected with it. The prosecution had termed it as a major success for it.

59-year-old Malik who is serving a life sentence in a terror funding case in Delhi’s Tihar Jail has been appearing in the CBI court through video conferencing. He had earlier sought physical appearance and self-cross examination of witnesses in the case. But the plea was rejected as the Union Home ministry had some time ago passed an order barring him from moving out of Tihar Jail, because of a pending National Investigation Agency (NIA) case against him.

Malik was sentenced for life by a special NIA court in New Delhi in May 2022 after his conviction in a terror funding case is among several members of the banned organisation accused of conspiring or being actively involved in the sensational kidnapping which proved a watershed for militancy in the Valley.

In January 2021, the CBI, with help from special public prosecutors Monika Kohli and S K Bhat, framed charges against Malik and nine others in the case. In 1999, three JKLF activists Shoukat Ahmed Bakshi, Manzoor Ahmed Sofi and Mohammad Iqbal Gandroo arrested for kidnapping Rubaiya were granted bail by the court after nine years.

Ms. Rubiaya currently lives with her family in Tamil Nadu. The then J&K chief minister Farooq Abdullah who had strongly opposed releasing any militants to secure her release from the JKLF captivity had later said that setting five of its hardcore members only gave fillip to militancy in Kashmir. He had alleged that his government was threatened with dismissal by the Centre if the militants were not exchanged for the Home Minister’s daughter.