Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front and Mohammad Yasin Malik

Brief History of Mohammad Yasin Malik

Yasin Malik was born on April 3, 1966, in Srinagar’s downtown Maisuma neighbourhood of Jammu and Kashmir, India.

Malik began his criminal activities at a young age in the 1980s, when he founded the Tala party, which was involved in an attempt to disrupt the 1983 cricket match between India and West Indies at the Sher-e-Kashmir Stadium in Srinagar, as well as staging a protest against the February 11, 1984 execution of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) founder Mohammad Maqbool Bhat in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

Malik’s criminal activities increased after his Tala party was renamed Islamic Students League (ISL), which vigorously campaigned for Muslim United Front (MUF) candidates in the 1987 Jammu and Kashmir state assembly elections. He was detained for preservation of law and order for months on multiple occasions.

Malik’s criminal activities increased after his Tala party was renamed Islamic Students League (ISL), which vigorously campaigned for Muslim United Front (MUF) candidates including Mohammad Yousuf Shah in the 1987 Jammu and Kashmir state assembly elections. He was detained for preservation of law and order for months on multiple occasions.

The MUF candidates, including Mohammad Yousuf Shah, were defeated in the elections and shortly after, rumours of rigged elections were propagated. Shah, also known as Syed Sallahuddin, is now the commander of the United Nations proscribed and banned terrorist outfit Hizbul Mujahideen based in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoJK).

Both Shah and Malik were visible figures among many others arrested for sowing public discord in the months following the elections. Malik was among the first section of people to cross the Line of Control (LoC) into Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir in 1988 for terrorist training in terrorist camps set up by Pakistan.

Within a year, Malik returned to the Kashmir Valley after arms training and indoctrination in Pakistan and joined JKLF as a core member. The JKLF’s core group included Malik, Hameed Sheikh, Ashfaq Wani, and Javed Mir. While Wani was killed in a gunfight with security forces in March 1990, Malik was apprehended in an injured state in August 1990 and imprisoned until May 1994. Sheikh and six other JKLF militants were killed on November 19, 1992, at Ali Kadal in downtown Srinagar, while Mir now leads a separate faction of the JKLF.

Following his release on bail in May 1994, Malik declared a shallow indefinite unilateral ceasefire to continue the nonviolent struggle for Jammu and Kashmir’s so-called “independence” from both India and Pakistan. However, he continued to support terrorism and terrorist acts.

In 1995, Pakistan-based JKLF founder Amanullah Khan deposed Malik as party president. Malik, on the other hand, expelled Khan from the chairmanship and received support from his party colleagues in Pakistan and beyond.

He joined the Hurriyat Conference, a conglomerate of various separatist organisations formed in 1993, but took a cautious approach when the conglomerate split between hardliners and moderates in September 2003.

In 2009, he married British Pakistani woman Mushaal Hussein Mullick, who is 20 years younger than him, and the couple has a daughter, Razia Sultana, who lives in Pakistan with her mother.

During a visit to Pakistan in February 2013, Malik was seen sharing a dais with the chief of the United Nations-designated terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, at a protest in Islamabad against the execution of Indian Parliament attack convict and terrorist Afzal Guru.

Malik was apprehended in 2019 by the Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA), the country’s premier investigation agency for terrorism and related crimes. The NIA had earlier in its First Information Report (FIR) stated that Kashmiri separatists received funds from Pakistan, including from Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Syed Salahuddin of the Hizbul Mujahideen, for activities such as stone-pelting and school burning.

Malik was apprehended in 2019 by the Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA), the country’s premier investigation agency for terrorism and related crimes. The NIA had earlier in its First Information Report (FIR)  stated that Kashmiri separatists received funds from Pakistan, including from Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Syed Salahuddin of the Hizbul Mujahideen, for activities such as stone-pelting and school burning in 2017.

According to the NIA, Malik revealed during interrogation that he was central to the formation of the ‘Joint Resistance Leadership’, which spearheaded the violent agitation in Kashmir in 2016 following the July 2016 killing of Hizbul Mujahideen Terrorist commander Burhan Wani.

The NIA also identified Kashmiri businessman Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali as a key figure who received funds from Pakistan through its intelligence agency ISI, and the UAE via the hawala system and a number of shell companies. He’d then pass them on to separatist leaders like Yasin Malik and stone-pelting organisers in Kashmir.

Yasin Malik’s home was searched on February 26, 2019, and incriminating material such as documents and electronic devices were seized. These included letterheads of internationally sanctioned terrorist organisations such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Hizbul Mujahideen.

On April 10, 2019, Yasin Malik was arrested in connection with a cases involving the funding of terrorism and separatist groups in Jammu and Kashmir, India.

In March 2020, a special NIA court in Delhi reviewed the evidence, and ordered the framing of charges against Yasin Malik and others under the stringent UAPA and Indian Penal Code in terrorism funding cases.

Simultaneously, in March 2020, Yasin Malik and six others were charged for the January 25, 1990 attack on Indian Air Force personnel in Rawalpora, Srinagar, under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), the Arms Act 1959, and the Ranbir Penal Code. 

On May 19, 2022, after admitting guilt in the terrorism financing case NIA vs Yasin Malik, Malik was convicted of Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) various violations as well as conspiracy and sedition offences under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Subsequently, on May 25, 2022. Yasin Malik was sentenced by a NIA special court in a 2017 terror-funding case as below;

Additional Recorded Criminal Activities by Cases Pending against Mohammad Yasin Malik

According to reports, Yasin Malik is facing over 65 criminal charges.  The majority of the charges brought against him are murder, attempted murder, rioting, terrorist acts, terrorist funding and sedition. Most notoriously, Yasin Malik is responsible for the Kashmiri Hindu exodus from their native homeland in Kashmir, involved in the kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of then-Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, as well as the early 1990s murder of four Indian Air Force personnel.