“We don’t provide legal aid to individual Kashmiri cases”
Srinagar: When Kashmir’s PhD scholar was arrested by Delhi police’s special cell in July 2001, his family sought help from a Delhi-based lawyer to fight frivolous cases slapped on their son.
It was after sixteen long years that Gulzar Ahmad Wani was pronounced innocent in at least fourteen cases registered against him in three states.
Gulzar, a resident of Tapper Pattan in Baramulla district, was in second year of his research at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).
He was accused to be behind Sabarmati Express train blasts which took place in August 2000.
His father took fight alone and approached advocate M S Khan who fought up to 2010 before he left for the world hereafter.
“It was then that his son who put on his father’s robe and the case was finally closed on My 20, 2017,” said Gh Ahmad Wani, father of Gulzar.
Wani said that it was him or his family which managed the finances for fighting the legal battle which they finally won last Saturday when a sessions court in Barbanki in Uttar Pradesh pronounced that Gulzar was innocent.
However, Gulzar will be traveling to Nagpur where one of his cases faced some technical fault and is yet to be closed before he comes home.
Interestingly, on Saturday, Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind (Arshad Madni) group claimed that his group provided legal help to Gulzar.
The group, however, provides legal assistance to Muslims of India falsely implicated in “terror” cases across India.
“Whatever we did regarding legal battle, we did at our own,” Gulzar’s father asserted. “Nobody helped us.”
But, he added, “the lawyer who appeared in the final argument is associated with Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind but we had approached him on our own. Later, the group also told the lawyer to help us but we provided the fees to the lawyer,” he informed.
In 2016, Gulzar had applied for a bail which was turned down by a court in UP. “It was at that time that Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind also helped us,” he said.
Speaking to TwoCircles.net, a news website which works for Muslim community, Gulzar Azmi, who heads the legal aid committee of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, said, “we don’t provide legal aid to individual Kashmiri cases.”
“We consider only those Kashmiri cases where co accused is also from other Indian state,” he added.
