Jailed chairman of Tehreek e Hurriyat, Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai, a close aide of senior separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani, passed away at a Jammu hospital on Wednesday, a day after he was shifted there from Udhampur Jail.
Sehrai, who was booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA) in July last year, was on Tuesday admitted to Government Medical College (GMC) Jammu after his health deteriorated, reports said. He was suffering from multiple ailments.
Sehrai had reportedly developed pneumonia in jail. His Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) for Covid-19 came negative while the RT-PCR result is still awaited. The police had on Tuesday informed his family in Srinagar about the deterioration in his health condition and told them to reach GMC Jammu.
Sehrai’s stature among separatist leaders had risen when his son Junaid joined militancy in 2018, immediately after he was elected as chairman of the TeH -- a political party Geelani had founded with Sehrai after parting ways from their parent organisation Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir.
Junaid, who had completed MBA from Kashmir University before joining militancy, was killed in an encounter with security forces in Srinagar on May 19 last year. Just two months after the killing of his son, 77-year-old Sehrai was booked under the PSA.
Sehrai and Geelani, both strong votaries of implementation of the UN resolutions on Kashmir, had been close associates for the last six decades, first in Jamiat-e-Islami J&K and later in TeH. Sehrai, like Geelani, had been in and out of jail for years together.
Originally hailing from north Kashmir’s frontier Kupwara district, Sehrai had been residing in Srinagar for more than two decades. Official sources said the family won’t be permitted to bury him in Srinagar. “Most probably he will be buried in his native village in Kupwara,” they said.
Meanwhile, separatist-turned-mainstream leader and former minister Sajad Lone regretted that Sehrai died in incarceration. “Why did he have to die in incarceration and not at his home amongst his kin and loved ones. Have we become so weak that an old infirm dying person is a threat to the state,” he said in a tweet.