Thursday, 6 February 2020

Omar, Mehbooba booked under Public Safety Act on last day of detention

Earlier in the day, the PSA was also slapped on two political stalwarts from NC and its arch-rival PDP
Mehbooba Mufti, Omar Abdullah
Former Jammu and Kashmir chief ministers Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti were on Thursday night booked under the stringent Public Safety Act (PSA), barely hours before their six-month-long “preventive detention” was to come to an end. Earlier in the day, the PSA was also slapped on two political stalwarts from NC and its arch-rival PDP.
A magistrate accompanied by a police officer arrived at Hari Nivas where 49-year-old Omar Abdullah has been detained since August 5, the day the Centre abrogated the special status of the erstwhile state and also announced its bifurcation into two union territories — Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir. He was handed over a warrant issued under the PSA, a law which was enacted by his grandfather Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah in 1978 initially to check timber smuggling.
The PSA, which came handy for police force to book separatists and militant sympathisers, has two sections — ‘public order’ and ‘threat to security of the state’. The former allows detention without trial for six months and the latter for two years. Omar, who has been junior foreign minister and commerce minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led Cabinet in 2000, was served with a three-page dossier in which he was alleged to have made statements in the past which were “subversive” in nature…

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