Kashmiri separatist leader held in US

FBI says Ghulam Nabi Fai contacted ISI handlers 4,000 times since June 2008

 This was disclosed by the FBI in documents filed in a court in Alexandria, where 62-year-old Fai, a US citizen, was produced soon after his arrest from his home in Fairfax, Virginia, on Tuesday.

Fai, Director of the Kashmiri American Council (KAC) — a Washington-based group that lobbies for “self-determination” for Kashmir, faces up to five years in prison if proved guilty. His next court hearing is scheduled for Friday.

Identifying Fai’s four handlers in ISI, the FBI made public their phone numbers and emails addresses. Fai’s alleged handlers in Pakistan were identified as Abdullah; Javeed Aziz Khan aka ‘Rathore’; Abdullah aka ‘Nizami Mir’; and Touqeer Mehmood Butt aka Sohail Mahmood, who goes by the nickname ‘Mir’.

Since June 2008, Fai contacted them more than 4,000 times till his arrest. Between 2006 and early 2011, Javeed Aziz Khan contacted Fai for nearly 2,000 times, the FBI said in a 43-page affidavit.

It said Brigadier Abdullah was the ISI officer responsible for handling Kashmir affairs. Fai acted at the direction of his handlers from ISI, court documents said.

In the course of executing the searches, investigators found the “1999 Strategy Document for the Kashmiri American Council, Washington, DC USA” and documents with similar titles for 2000, 2001, 2005 and 2006.

These documents described the Kashmiri American Council’s plans to provide information to Executive Branch officials, use Congress to highlight the issue of Kashmir, offset the Indian lobby and increase political pressure on both the US administration and government of India. Fai provided similar documents to his handlers in 2008 and 2009, the FBI said.

Court-authorised physical searches of Fai’s residence and storage facility revealed 22 letters written by him to Zaheer Ahmad, another US citizen charged along with Fai, on a near-monthly basis between December 2003 and April 2006.

Those letters contained balance sheets accounting for the money Fai had received to date during that fiscal year, the identity of the individuals who had sent him the money and how much, and the amount Ahmad still needed to send to Fai.

They reflected that Ahmad was to transmit approximately $314,500 to Fai in 2003; in 2004, 2005, and 2006, the totals were $505,000, $525,000 and $447,000, respectively.
According to the FBI estimate, the total amount transmitted from the government of Pakistan through Ahmad and his funding network to Fai and the KAC since the mid-1990s is at least $4 million.

The affidavit also said that up to 80 per cent of the public statements made by Fai were provided by the Pakistani spy agency to “repeat and disseminate verbatim.”
“The other 20 per cent of the KAC’s messaging consists of Fai’s own ideas, which have been pre-approved by the ISI but not provided by them,” it said.

According to court documents, a confidential witness told the FBI the ISI selected Fai because he had no overt ties to Pakistan.

 Activists, scribes may be questioned

Security agencies may soon question human rights activists, a Kashmiri separatist leader and journalists who allegedly enjoyed hospitality of Ghulam Nabi Fai arrested in America on charges of being an outfit of Pakistan’s ISI, PTI reports from New Delhi.

The government is likely to give a green signal to their quizzing after the examination of the affidavit submitted by the FBI in a US court. Sources in the Home Ministry said a decision to question Hurriyat Conference chairman Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, who had been attending various seminars organised by Fai, may be the first one to be examined.
Sources in the ministry said some journalists were also taken to the US for attending the seminars hosted by him.