The 32-year-old alleged operative of terrorist group Hizbul Mujahideen arrested in Anand, Gujarat on Saturday is a camp coordinator of a medical centre run by an NGO and has no terror links, the suspect’s family in Kashmir said on Monday.
Bashir Ahmad Baba, arrested by the Gujarat
anti-terrorism squad on charges of being a “Hizb associate and a recruiter of vulnerable youth for arms training”, was a victim of a conspiracy, his family alleged.
Bashir’s family said he was a camp coordinator of a cleft centre and craniofacial research institute run by NGO Kimaaya, and had gone to Ahmedabad a month ago for training in order to establish his own cleft centre.
“For the past four days we lost contact with him, and suddenly on Sunday there was news on TV about his arrest,” Bashir’s younger brother Nazir Ahmad Baba said. “The allegations against him are totally baseless.”
Bashir, who completed his M.A. in Urdu from the Indira Gandhi National Open University last year, is the eldest of four siblings.
“We request Chief Minister Omar (Abdullah) to intervene and tell us why it (the arrest) has happened, how it has happened, on what charges he was arrested and what the proof of his involvement is,” Nazir said.
Dr Mohammad Shakeel, head of the maxillofacial and cleft centre at the dental department of Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences and director of the Kimayaa cleft centre in Srinagar, said Bashir was a “brilliant boy and a sincere worker”.