Senior leader of All Parties Hurriyat Conference Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Chairman of People’s Freedom League Muhammad Farooq Rehmani, has said that the people of Kashmir will always remember and eulogize sacrifices of Shaheed Maqbool Butt and Shaheed Afzel Guru who embraced martyrdom for a just and noble cause. 

India had hanged Muhammad Afzal Guru in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail on February 9 in 2013 and sent prominent liberation leader, Muhammad Maqbool Butt, to the gallows in the same jail on February 11, 1984.  Their bodies were buried in the premises of the jail. 

He said in their lifetime the people of occupied Jammu and Kashmir courageously and peacefully made endeavours on a hazardous path of freedom struggle with martyrdom of thousands of young men to awaken the world conscience but instead, Maqbool Butt was judicially murdered and Afzal Guru was hanged to please the collective conscience of the Indian public opinion in the words of the Indian court. 

He said it was a matter of shame and sorrow that the last remains of Shaheed Maqbool Butt and Shaheed Afzal Guru were not handed over to their families for burial in their respective ancestral graveyards. Muhammad Farooq Rehmani said that in spite of hanging Muhammad Maqbool Butt and Muhammad Afzal Guru, India could not silence and suppress the freedom voice and struggle of the people and as a result thousands of youth are incarcerated in jails and many more have been martyred or killed in fake encounters or in police custody.

He further said lakhs of fake domicile certificates have been issued to Indian citizens, demographic changes carried out, properties attached or seized, Muslim employees terminated from services and non-Kashmiris recruited and appointed in State administration.  

Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP)