Militant Majid returns home

The 20-year-old footballer had joined the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba last week.

of the young boys who have picked up guns want to return and lead normal lives, but, according to her, the social stigma of surrender was not allowing them to do so.

Earlier, Ashya Begum, Majid’s mother, had made an emotional appeal, with tears rolling down her eyes, asking her only son to return home. Majid’s parents had told media that Majid had gone missing a week ago. Subsequently, photographs showing him posing with an assault rifle on WhatsApp had gone viral in Kashmir.

At a press conference, Major General B. S. Raju said that the Army facilitated Majid’s decision to return home after he had spent a week with Lashkar militants. Raju said that they had neither arrested him nor did he surrender, as Majid was also present at the press conference. Kashmir police chief Muneer Khan, who was also present, told the media that they would not press any charges against Majid and would allow him to join his family. Earlier, former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah had tweeted that he was hopeful that police would not harass him. Meanwhile, in a statement to a local press agency, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba’s J&K chief Mehmood Shah said that they permitted Majid to leave for his home on the request of his mother, “since he was the only son of his family”. Buoyed with the National Green Tribunal ( NGT) clearance to his pet project Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has decided to invite Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to lay some foundation stones for the construction of the green field capital city in the last week of January 2018, when the latter visits India to be one of the guests on Republic Day. Loong, one of the 10 heads of governments of Asean countries invited by India to be one of the guests on Republic Day, is the prime force behind the Singapore government and private consortiums’ initiative to build the new capital city of Andhra Pradesh. Singapore’s trade and industries minister S. Iswaran has been coordinating the consortia’s projects in AP. Naidu wanted to invite Loong last year to oversee the ground work of the capital city construction, but the idea was shelved as there was no official invitation to the PM from the Government of India. Now that India has officially invited him,