By Staff Reporter
MUZAFFARABAD: A senior leader of a banned Kashmiri activist group was reported arrested on Tuesday in a security operation in Azad Kashmir, though officials declined to confirm the development for hours, leaving conflicting accounts of where and how the detention took place.
Shaukat Nawaz Mir, a core leader of the proscribed Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), was named by activists on social media as having been taken into custody in the Dhirkot subdivision of Bagh district. Police sources said security personnel had launched a combing operation in the area where Mir was believed to be hiding and detained him near Airan Nullah on Tuesday afternoon, along with two other suspects.
Separately, Geo News reported that Muzaffarabad Deputy Commissioner Munir Ahmed Qureshi had confirmed the arrest, saying Mir was detained by police and security personnel in the Hail Sarang area. IP could not immediately reconcile the two accounts of the arrest location, and Qureshi did not respond to repeated attempts to reach him for comment.
No government official was willing to confirm the arrest on the record. Despite the lack of an official statement, police erected barricades along the main road in Mir’s home neighborhood in Muzaffarabad, and many businesses in parts of the city shut their doors as a precaution. Authorities said there was no law-and-order threat in the state capital.
Mir, 52, is one of four core JAAC leaders wanted by the government, which has offered a combined reward of 10 million rupees for their capture. He also faces sedition charges and had been evading arrest since the bounty was announced. Two other wanted JAAC leaders, Sohaib Javed and Hafeez Hamdani, remained at large as of Tuesday, according to police sources.
Mir rose to prominence more than five years ago when he was elected president of Muzaffarabad’s traders’ association under a “one shop, one vote” system, representing close to 10,000 shopkeepers. He later became one of the most visible figures in JAAC’s protest movement, serving as one of the group’s principal spokesmen.
The Azad Jammu and Kashmir government banned JAAC on June 5 under the Anti-Terrorism Act following violent protests. The group’s campaign has centered on a demand to abolish 12 seats in the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly reserved for refugees from Indian-occupied Kashmir who migrated to Pakistan after 1947.
The federal government has characterized the demand as an attempt to disrupt the electoral process ahead of July 27 elections for the 53-member Azad Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly. Earlier this month, an All Parties Conference convened at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat in Muzaffarabad unanimously rejected the demand to eliminate the reserved seats. Participants at the conference said any changes to the assembly’s composition fall exclusively within the mandate of elected representatives and cannot be pursued through means outside the parliamentary process.
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