The police in Jammu and Kashmir on Saturday filed a first information report against unnamed persons after some videos allegedly showed the body of separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani draped in the Pakistani flag, PTI reported.
The police registered the FIR under sections of the Indian Penal Code and the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, according to the news agency.
The 92-year-old pro-Pakistan leader died in his home in Srinagar on Wednesday night. He had been unwell for several months.
After his death, the police had imposed restrictions on gatherings in the Valley. Phone and internet services were also suspended. Srinagar’s Hyderpora neighbourhood, where Geelani lived, was sealed with barbed wires.
Mobile internet in Kashmir remains suspended, according to NDTV. Phone and broadband internet facilities were restored on Friday night, after which the videos emerged on social media.
Geelani was buried on Thursday morning, according to the news channel. Jammu and Kashmir Police chief Dilbag Singh alleged that some people at the separatist leader’s home shouted anti-national slogans and misbehaved with the police.
“FIR has been registered into all anti-national activities,” Singh said, according to NDTV. “We never expected such unruly behaviour by the family and other people at Geelani house especially since the police was in regular touch with the family and Geelani Sahab.”
Geelani’s son had alleged that the police buried him forcibly. “Nobody from the family was present for his burial,” Naseem Geelani had told AP. “We tried to resist but they overpowered us and even scuffled with women.”
The All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an amalgam of separatist political outfits in the Valley, denounced the FIRs. It said that the details shared by Naseem Geelani on how the family was not allowed to attend the burial were “appalling and painful” to hear.
“It is so tragically inhuman when a family is denied the basic right of burial of their loved one and one can only imagine what the family must have gone through,” the All Parties Hurriyat Conference said in a statement. “After such harshness, the authorities are now harassing the family with FIRs and threats of arrests, further exposing their cruelty.
But the police claimed that Geelani’s relatives participated in his last rites.
“The police facilitated in bringing the dead body from the house to graveyard as there was apprehension that miscreants might take undue advantage of [the] situation,” Inspector General of Police Vijay Kumar said on Thursday.
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Geelani, the pro-Pakistan Kashmiri leader, had not always despaired of democratic processes in India
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