A Jammu and Kashmir police official on Sunday hurled his service shoe at chief minister Omar Abdullah during the Independence Day function at Srinagar’s Bakshi Stadium while the simmering Valley witnessed another day of protests, street clashes, curfews and strike called by the separatists. After the incident 15 policemen including four officers were suspended.
The shoe flung from a back row of the VIP pavilion did not hit the CM but fell on the ground near the podium on which Mr Abdullah was standing to unfurl the tricolour. Ministers, top government functionaries and senior police officials were taken aback as the shoe came flying from the stands they were seated in. Plainclothesmen and the CM’s security detail swiftly overpowered the shoe-thrower later identified as head-constable Abdul Ahad Jan who also reportedly flashed a black flag and yelled “we want freedom” before being whisked away from scene. The CM later said that this was a better way of giving vent to anger than hurling rocks. “Throw shoes, not stones,” he said in an apparent reference to unending street clashes during which Kashmiri youth target the police and the paramilitary forces with rocks and wish to refer the same as Intifada in a nod to the earlier uprisings of Palestinian rock-throwing youth against Israeli forces.
The statement said, “At the time of unfurling the national flag by the chief minister a person hurled a shoe towards the podium. He was whisked away by security forces personnel from the venue for questioning which revealed his identity as Abdul Ahad Jan, a resident of Ajas in northern Bandipora district and a suspended head constable reportedly mentally unsound and facing charges in a criminal case under FIR No:123 dated May 21, 2010 registered against him in Police Station Parimpora, Srinagar.” Jan’s son Shakeel Ahmed denied his father was suffering from psychiatric illness. “He is perfectly alright but disturbed as his promotion in lieu of saving the life of a deputy IGP in a bomb explosion a few years ago has been withheld for unknown reasons,” he told reporters.