Separatist Yasin Malik sentenced to life in jail
NIA had sought death penalty for Malik who pleaded guilty to all charges
A Delhi court on Wednesday awarded life imprisonment to Kashmiri separatist leader Yasin Malik in a terror funding case.
Special Judge Praveen Singh also awarded varying jail terms for various offences under the stringent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The court also imposed a fine of over ~10 lakh on Malik.
The life term was awarded for two offences — Section 121 (waging war against the government of India) of IPC and section 17 (raising funds for the terrorist act) of the UAPA.
All the sentences will run concurrently. From a Pakistan-trained militant to one of the prominent separatist faces in Kashmir, life has come a full circle for chief of the banned Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) Malik who was in limelight for varied reasons over the past three decades of turmoil in the erstwhile restive border state. The 56-year-old Malik has been in and out of jail several times dating back to his student activism days before the onset of militancy in 1990.
Having renounced the path of violence and donned the political cloak in 1994, Malik, who is married to a Pakistani artist and has a 10-year-old daughter, had announced Gandhian way of protest after his release and was perceived to be a moderate voice in the separatist camp.
He was arrested in early 2019 in connection with a 2017 terror-funding case registered by National Investigation Agency (NIA).
Born on April 3, 1966 in Maisuma locality in the heart of Srinagar, Malik is also facing trial in the much-publicised abduction case of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the then Union home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in 1989, and an attack by JKLF militants on IAF personnel in Srinagar that left four dead.