Chairman Hurriyat Conference (G) Syed Ali Shah Geelani could not attend the Friday congregational prayers due to his continuous house arrest, party spokesperson said in a statement.
He said in 2017, Geelani was stopped 48 times from offering Friday prayers, an important religious obligation.
Meanwhile, Tehreek-e-Huriyat general secretary Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai continued to remain under the house detention today for the third consecutive day and they too were not allowed to offer the Friday prayers, the spokesperson said.
He said Hurriyat spokesman Ghulam Ahmad Gulzar, Muhammad Yusuf Naqash, Muhammad Yasin Ataie and Syed Imtiyaz Hyder are continuously lodged in different police stations.
Strongly condemning the house imprisonment of Geelani and other resistance leaders, Hurriyat Conference said “the imprisonment of its leaders has no constitutional and moral justification and police is suppressing their peaceful voices just with the barrel of gun.”
“Police invented a new process of house arrests and banning of political activities of Geelani Sahib and other leaders during 2010 mass uprising in Jammu & Kashmir. Since then police never produced any legal justification for this illegal house arrest process and they never explained that under which act or section of the law is Geelani being imprisoned in his house. This lawlessness continued in the period of Omar Abdullah and now PDP government is following the suite in its rule,” he said.
Denouncing PDP-led coalition, the spokesperson said that “their rhetoric about battle of idea proved hoax and they proved most opportunistic, saying that despite their tall claims about freedom of expression, they are chasing political leaders, strangulating genuine voices, curbing peaceful political activities and implicating and caging youth on fake allegations.”