Journalists staged a demonstration in New Delhi protesting Gilani's arrest

By IOL South Asia Correspondent

New Delhi, January 12 (IslamOnline) — The government of National Capital Territory (NCT) decided, with the prior consent of the federal government, to withdraw charges against Kashmiri journalist Iftikhar Gilani under Official Secrets Act, media reports said Saturday, January 11.

Gilani was accused of possessing sensitive "secret" documents regarding Indian troop deployment in Jammu and Kashmir.

After seven months of detention, it turns out that the Delhi Police had fabricated charges against Gilani.

His lawyer VK Ohri said that the case would be taken up for hearing on Monday, January 13.

Ohri said the government attorney had asked the court Friday, January 10, "to withdraw the case keeping in view the circumstances, evidence on record and the public interest."

From the beginning, it was clear that Gilani had been framed up not because of anything he had done, but simply because he is the son-in-law of pro-Pakistan Kashmiri leader Syed Ali Shah Gilani.

Human rights groups and journalists’ organizations had repeatedly protested Gilani’s arrest on trumped up charges.

At one point 400 journalists, including some of the top names in the profession, staged a demonstration in New Delhi and presented a memorandum to the federal interior minister LK Advani, now also deputy prime minister, demanding Gilani's release.

Reporters Without Frontiers was among major international organizations formally demanding Gilani's release and dropping the fabricated charges against him.

Gilani has been Delhi bureau chief of Kashmir Times daily. He also worked as a stringer for Pakistani newspaper Nation and German Radio.

After arresting him last year, police were at a fix about which charges to book him under.

They tried to charge him with pornography ostensibly because he had got some obscene e-mail.

Finding that inadequate and unconvincing, they tried to frame him up for income tax evasion. That too turned out to be a non-starter.

Finally, police settled on "possession of sensitive documents" on India’s troop mobilization on Indo-Pak border.

Police claimed a document stored on his computer hard disk was "secret", while the fact was that the same document was available in Indian and Pakistani libraries and accessible on the Internet.

The defense lawyer underlined that what police were parading as "secret" document was actually part of an article "Indian Repression in Kashmir" by Shireen Mazari published in the autumn 1996 issue of Islamabad Papers, journal of the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad.

The "document" was sent to Military Intelligence which said it was not classified or secret.

The government, which did not want to release Gilani, sent the document back for a second opinion.

Instead of producing the report before the court, police confiscated it and filed a "false and fabricated" report, Gilani’s lawyer complained.

The defense lawyer produced the real report of the Military Intelligence before the court, which said the document "carried no security classified information and that information seems to have been gathered from open sources."

Only last week, the federal government opposed Gilani’s release and scoffed at the opinion of the Director-General of Military Intelligence, OS Lochate, who had said there was nothing secret about Gilani’s documents.

Last month a member of parliament, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, had accused the federal interior ministry of perpetuating a vicious fraud in Gilani’s case.

Pointing at interior minister LK Advani, whose ministry controls the Delhi Police, Singh said that the ministry had fraudulently fabricated the Military Intelligence report, with ill intention to keep Gilani behind bars.

He even named the ministry undersecretary who had done the mischief.

Singh challenged Advani to refute his argument but Advani chose to keep a grim silence.

The lawmaker also highlighted the government's harassment of news portal tehelka.com.

All this, Singh said, amounted to an attempt to silence the press.