In the year 1977, the very first trace of Pakistani Jihad arrived in the UK.
The “Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front”, a terrorist organization indulging in secessionist warfare against the Indian government & trying to secure the independence of Kashmir, set up shop in Birmingham.
This “headquarter” of the JKLF was lead by a man named Amanullah Khan, who was a co-founder of the parent body of the JKLF, the “ Kashmir Independence Committee” [founded in Pakistan occupied Kashmir in ~1962].
Between 1977 and 1984, JKLF managed to gain a sizeable footing in the west and the islamic world.
It had offices in Holland, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the United States [New York].
Their history is recalled in this 1986 piece on Amanullah Khan’s deportation from Britain, the first such order carried out in over a decade.
The history of the shadowy organisation goes back to August 1965 when four activists got together in Peshawar and formed the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front (JKNLF). The front’s political wing was under Amanullah Khan. In 1976, Khan came to Britain and a year later set up the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front in the UK to mobilise support amongst the 100,000 Kashmiris in the country.
Their campaign was for an independent state that had no ostensible links with either India or Pakistan. According to their recent published documents, the JKLF’s policy outside India is to embark on political and diplomatic fronts “in order to acquaint the world of the true nature of the Kashmir issue” and to “show the real face of Indian neocolonialism concealed under the mask of the biggest democracy on earth”.
Latif Khan, currently the acting president of the JKLF, pointed out that the organisation has 11 branches in Britain and affiliated branches in Paris, Holland, West Germany, New York, the UAE and Jeddah. A founder-member, Latif Khan says: “Outside of Jammu-Kashmir, our struggle for independence is purely a non-violent and peaceful one. Inside the state, we will continue with our armed struggle.”
This deportation didn’t deter amanullah khan any way. He continued his nefarious designs, this time from USA. This united nations human rights commission report from 1991 states:
In April 1990, Amanullah Khan, the leader of the Pakistan-based JKLF, ordered, while he was in the United States, the execution of three kidnapped persons in Kashmir.
The Indian government is seeking the extradition of Khan from the United States for allegedly directing the activities of “terrorist elements” in Kashmir (The Independent 20 April 1990; The Washington Post 13 April 1990).
The important thing in the above text is that the above event took place in the year 1990.
On 19th January 1990, Kashmiri Pandits, the Hindu aborigines of Kashmir, were ethnically cleansed by pakistan backed muslim terrorists and kashmiri muslims.
Even after the exodus of over 400,000 Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley, intermittent cold-blooded slaughters of Kashmiri Hindus continued throughout much of 1990. A few cases are mentioned in this excellent video.
The JKLF was at the forefront of this ethnic cleansing in 1990, and its currently imprisoned leader [of the Indian “branch”] Yasin Malik, was also involved in the murder of innocent Kashmiri Pandits, as well as 4 Indian Air Force officials.
So, it’s easy to ascertain that Amanullah Khan was involved in the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus, even though he was living in USA AFTER a deportation from the UK.
It is imperative for the US government to answer WHY & HOW was a man deported from the UK allowed to reside in USA in the first place.
Anyway, coming back to Amanullah and the UK, and his arrival in the UK in 1977.
4 years after his arrival in Britain, Amanullah met with a man named Qayyum Raja in Germany [in 1981] and extended him an invite to become a member of the JKLF.
Qayyum accepted the same and went on to be the founding member/president of a JKLF chapter in France.
He started networking with politicians, bishops and other sundry power centres in Europe, asking for their help in pressurising the Indian government in order to secure the release of the co-founder of the jklf, a man named maqbool bhat who was imprisoned by the Indian government and was on death row.
At this time, another co-founder of the JKLF, a man named Hashim Qureshi started scheming in order to secure the release of Maqbool Bhat.
Having previously carried out the hijacking of an Indian airliner in 1971, he devised a scheme to hijack a plane in 1983 in order to secure the release of Maqbool Bhat.
Before opening a detailed discussion on Mhatre case, I must speak about the contemplated plan of hijacking an airliner. Such a plan was certainly there with the objective of seeking the release of Maqbool Butt.
Being ignorant of political and military strategies and impatient to win cheap and quick popularity, Amanullah Khan wrecked the entire plan, for the execution of this plan, he had selected two persons from Paris and two from London.
The Paris team however, did not meet with Amanullah Khan for such a big adventure nor were they briefed on the subject. But the two persons sent from London to bring the Paris team.
Had been instructed to brief them during the journey. This was disclosed by Amanullah Khan in his letter addressed to me and to Dr. Farooq Haider. He wrote” owing to paucity of time and no chance of a meeting could not make a briefing to Qayum and others.
The other two people could not make him understand. Qayyum could not come because of legal constraints and I could not go to Paris for want of time.
For such a stupendous project, Amanullah Khan selected a team of four persons who had neither any knowledge of the technique of hijacking an aircraft nor did they know one another.
They were given no training whatever of the mission entrusted to them. None among them had ever taken a gun or a pistol in his hand. Yes, of course they were brimming with sentiment.
The hijacking was to synchronies with the Non-Aligned countries moot scheduled for 9–11 March 1983 in New Delhi . Earlier a plan of blasting the conference of the foreign ministers of non- aligned countries in Delhi had been chalked out which would have labeled us as CIA agents.
The contemplated plan of hijacking an aircraft faille because, as already said, all the four persons were untrained for the job nor had they been briefed in a group.
At the eleventh hour, meaning at the time of boarding the airlines: they were frightened and without carrying arms on board, arrived in India. Three of them returned by road and came to my place in Rawalpindi.
In December,1983, news started trickling out that maqbool bhat would be put to death by the Indian government.
Alarmed by this, [Qayyum] Raja went to the UK to discuss this development with his friends and while there, decided upon a plan to abduct an Indian diplomat and use that diplomat as a pawn to secure the release of Maqbool Bhat [and a handful of other terrorists imprisoned by the Government of India].
On 3rd of February,1984, Mr. Mhatre got down from a bus stop near his home in Birmingham.
He was carrying in his hands a cake for his daughter’s birthday the next day [4-Feb-84], but never made it home.
Intercepted, pistol whipped over his head, he was pushed inside a car and taken to Alum Rock, a Birmingham neighborhood dominated by Muslims from Pakistan occupied Kashmir’s Mirpur region [commonly called Mirpuri muslims].
On the 4th, his captors delivered a pair of demands to the Indian government:
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Release bhat and a few other terrorists
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Provide 1 MILLION British Pounds to the JKLF.
24 hours were provided to the Indian government to make up their minds.
They refused outright.
A 3 hour extension was given, met with another refusal.
Qayyum Raja and 2 fellow terrorists took Mr. Mhatre to an isolated farm in Leicestershire, 40 miles away from where he was held captive.
Two of them walked alongside him and asked him to kneel down.
Mr. Mhatre, sensing his impending death, managed one act of heroism.
He was able to snatch the gun from the hands of the “other terrorist” who was going to shoot at him.
Seeing this, Qayyum Raja grabbed the gun out of Ravindra’s hands and the other terrorist grabbed it from Qayyum.
Then, Ravindra Mhatre was shot dead.
His killer is rumoured to be a man named Mussarat Iqbal, still living in Europe with another name.
The 3 killers disbanded immediately and went their own way. Amanullah Khan fled to Pakistan occupied Kashmir along with Mussarat Iqbal and Iqbal later returned to Europe under a fresh disguise.
The British government asked the pakistanis to hand these 2 men over, but the Pakistani government refused saying that they could not locate them.
Documents released by Britain’s national archives reveal that the West Midlands police had provided locations of the three suspects in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, but officials in Pakistan’s ministry of foreign affairs (MFA) stonewalled UK efforts to apprehend them.
In August 1984, Britain requested the Pakistan government, then headed by Gen Zia-ul-Haq, to initiate extradition proceedings against the three.
The documents state that the government agreed to the request “should it be established that the accused are in Pakistan”.
British ambassador Richard Fyjis-Walker wrote to the foreign office on January 17, 1985: “(Pakistan’s additional foreign secretary for European affairs) Dr Haider told me today that President Zia has accepted the MFA’s recommendation that extradition proceedings should be started.
“However, the first step was to establish whether the three men are in Pakistan. This involved police action which was being initiated.
Only if it is established that the men were in the country could the lengthy extradition process start.
“I am not sure how seriously the Pakistanis will try to find and apprehend the men.”
One murderer managed to live a peaceful life in USA:
Mohammad Aslam Mirza, 48, a British citizen and Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) militant, was arrested in 2004 in the United States for overstaying his visa.
Fingerprints revealed that he was a member of the JKLF, and fingerprints on the gun used to murder Mhatre revealed that he was wanted for the kidnap and murder of Mhatre.
Mirza told the court he was not involved in the murder and said that he was appalled by the charges and had no recollection of the events of 1984 due to severe memory problems.
On another instance, a Pakistani official claimed that Pakistan occupied Kashmir is not a part of Pakistan.
According to a “teleletter” to London by official SG Falconer on May 30, 1985, MFA official Shafkat Saeed had virtually admitted to him that PoK is not part of Pakistan: “He repeated that the problem was that the three suspects were in Kashmir, which legally is not part of Pakistan.
“Negotiations were proceeding with the Kashmir government and we could be assured that if the Pakistani authorities could lay their hands legally on the three suspects, they would immediately be arrested and arrangements made for their return to the UK. He implied clearly, however, that this was a big ‘if’.”
Such denials by Pakistani authorities made sure that the killers of Ravindra Mhatre never met justice.
A couple of months before the above-mentioned exodus of the Hindus from Kashmir valley in January’90, Mr. Neelkanth Ganjoo, the Kashmiri Pandit judge who had ordered the hanging of Maqbool Bhat, was shot dead in cold blood, and broad daylight .
