Maulana Showkat Ahmed Shah, a prominent Kashmiri cleric and a familiar face in the temperate ca-mp of the separatists, was killed, and three persons, including two women, wou-nded by a bomb detonated by remote control outside a mosque in Srinagar on Friday.
Police officials termed it a “target killing”. Shah, who was president of Jamiat-e-Ahle Hadith, which promotes Wahhabism, a religious movement or a branch within Sunni Islam, and is also involved in social work in Jammu and Kashmir, had survived two attempts on his life. No one had claimed responsibility for the bomb attack when reports last came in. The police laun-ched investigations into the killing, the first such attack near a place of worship in many months in Jammu and Kashmir. Chief minister Omar Abdullah said the government is “looking into all aspects to determine who is responsible”. The cleric was arrested on several occasions on charges of bei-ng a exponent of the Kash-miri separatist campaign.
However, Shah (57) was a vocal critic of stone-pelting during the pro-freedom protests and had termed it un-Islamic. Also, during the Amarnath land row, he earned the wrath of separatists and religious radicals after he and other senior Jamiat leaders met the then J&K governor, Lt. Gen. S.K. Sinha (Retd), to seek his help in establishing an Islamic trans-world university in Srinagar.
The police said Shah had been enroute to the mosque in Srinagar’s Gaw Kadal-Maisuma area to lead Friday prayers when, at 12.45 pm, an IED placed on a bicycle went off.