New Delhi, June 15
Senior separatist leader Hashim Qureshi has said all initial armed training to Kashmiri youths was imparted at the camps run by Pakistan’s Information Minister Sheikh Rashid.“Yaseen Malik has spoken truth. I was a senior office-bearer of the JKLF till 1994. I have myself talked to the cadres who were trained in his camp in Ternool,” said the man who had hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1971.
Qureshi, who is now opposed to the armed struggle, said all camps of the JKLF were being run from his farm house and land which is located 13 km from Rawalpindi on Peshawar road.
The camps at Sheikh Rashid’s were being looked after by the senior JKLF leader Sardar Rasheed Hasrat.
Qureshi, who broke away from the JKLF and formed his own JK Democratic Liberation Party, said “the camps were there till 1990 after which they were transferred to the other areas.”
When asked whether there were some more Pakistani ministers who had been running the camps for Kashmiri youths to train them in militancy, Qureshi said, “the better question will be whether there was any high official not involved in militancy.”
His comments come close on the heels of a sensational disclosure by Malik, who is at present in Pakistan, that “Sheikh Rashid had played a great role for Kashmir’s liberation. He used to support the frontline Jihadis, but very few people know about his contributions.” Malik has since denied the remarks.
This has led to a controversy with New Delhi accusing Islamabad of not honouring its pledge of stopping terrorism from its soil and Rashid denying it by saying that Malik might be talking of some other “Sheikh”.
— PTI
