LAHORE, May 28 (Online): The wife of incarcerated Kashmiri leader Yasin Malik, Mushaal Mullick, on Saturday urged the Pakistani government to raise the issue of her husband’s detention in an Indian jail at all global fora, fearing that the New Delhi government would commit his “judicial murder”.
The Peace and Culture Organisation (PCO) chairperson was addressing the media at Lahore’s Jinnah House, which was vandalised by protesters following the arrest of PTI chief Imran Khan on May 9.
Speaking on the occasion, Mushaal censured India’s top anti-terrorism probe body – National Investigation Agency’s (NIA) – reported move to again seek the death sentence for Malik, chief of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF).
On Friday, the NIA petitioned the high court in New Delhi seeking capital punishment for Malik.
The plea has been listed for hearing on May 29 (Monday).
Last year, an Indian court had turned down NIA’s petition of death sentence for Malik, saying capital punishment was for a crime that “shocks the collective consciousness” of society.
Mushaal, on Saturday, said her husband could be handed death sentence tomorrow (Monday).
“I want to tell [India Prime Minister Narendra] Modi that no Kashmiri is afraid of death. Yasin Malik is not [the name of] a person but is the name of a movement,” she remarked.
The PCO chairperson said Indian PM Modi will not be able to win the election by hanging her husband, adding that the people of Kashmir would react with full force to such an act.
She expressed her alarm, saying: “Modi’s fascist regime is hell-bent on silencing the most powerful voice of Kashmir freedom movement forever”.
She urged Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari to take up Malik’s case before the world leaders and at relevant UN forums and human rights organisations.
“It is high time the Pakistani government should play a proactive role to not only save his [Malik’s] life but to build maximum pressure on the Indian government to ensure his release from illegal detention.”
Mushaal stated that her husband’s life was in great danger because the Indian authorities could not buy his loyalty.
She warned that if anything happened to her husband, the entire region would “engulf in flames”, adding that the “notorious Indian government will be responsible for it”.
Malik, 57, was repeatedly jailed, spending 14 years in prison where he said he was tortured, and was finally arrested in 2018, months before New Delhi cancelled the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, imposing a lockdown and communications blockade lasting months.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment last year in a terror-funding case after his refusal to accept a government-appointed lawyer or to defend himself against the charges.
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