SRINAGAR: Handwritten posters threatening fuel pump operators against selling petrol to Police and security forces have mysteriously appeared on walls in the much terrorised Sopore township in Northern Kashmir on Friday.
Civilian sources as well as officials said that the handwritten and Xeroxed posters in Urdu, issued under purported seal and banner of hitherto unknown guerrilla group “Tehreek-e-Talibaan Jammu and Kashmir” were spotted at several places in Batpora, Armpora and Bus Stand area in the apple town early in the morning on Friday.
The posters asked the Muslims to be aware of the “conspiracies” and maintain “purely Islamic environment” around their surroundings.
In the fresh posters, fuel station owners have been warned against providing petrol and diesel to the vehicles of Police and the Indian armed forces. “People indulging in trade and consumption of drugs and tranquilisers”, television cable operators and the landlords providing accommodation to Bihari labourers besides the gamblers, and those who use their own premises for gambling, have been given the deadline of “only seven days” to abandon these practices.
“Don’t take us lightly. When we will come to act, we will award same kind of punishment to the defaulters which has been given out to the mobile phone tower landlords”, warned the posters.
Meanwhile, ‘Lashkar-e-Islam’, the guerrilla group that has forced shutdown of mobile telephony in parts of Northern and Southern Kashmir with a chain of attacks—in which 2 persons were shot dead and five more left injured, has confronted the hardline Hurriyat chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani with questions over the latter’s act of calling the group as a “creation of the Indian intelligence agencies”.
Lashkar-e-Islam challenged Geelani’s assertion and advised him to be careful in choosing his words and taking decisions with regard to the “genuineness” of the State’s guerrilla groups. It claimed to be a genuine militant outfit fighting for Kashmir’s separation from “Indian occupation”. It claimed that the ban on mobile telephony had been imposed “only after it became clear that a large number of the “Mujahideen” had been got arrested and killed only with the help of mobile phones.
In a significantly related development, senior separatist leader Shakeel Bakhshi has also questioned the top separatists’ wisdom of labelling the guerilla groups like LEI as the front of the Indian intelligence agencies. He has called for a thorough investigation onto the genuineness of the guerrilla groups.