Top separatist leaders in India, including Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and hardliners like Syed Ali Shah Geelani, have come under the security agencies’ scanner for their links with Ghulam Nabi Fai, an American citizen and director of the Washington-based Kashmiri American Council (KAC), arrested by the FBI on Tuesday on charges of being an agent of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.
In documents filed in a US court, the FBI charged that he had funnelled $4 million from the ISI to secretly try and influence US policy on Kashmir. The KAC is a group that lobbies for “self-determination” for Kashmir.
Fai, 62, who was produced in court soon after his arrest at his Fairfax, Virginia home on Tuesday, faces up to five years in prison. His next court hearing is on Thursday. The FBI claimed he had four “handlers” in the ISI and that he had contacted them over 4,000 times since June 2008.
In New Delhi, the Union home ministry expressed happiness at Fai’s arrest and the charges filed by the FBI which had “exposed” the ISI’s activities in the US, of which it claimed to have had prior information. The Indian government plans to seek details from the US authorities on the arrest and court proceedings there.
Indian officials said it might be too early to list Fai’s “suspicious” contacts within this country, but claimed that many top separatist leaders had met him and shared close links “since he acted as their spokesperson in various seminars organised by his NGO”.
The Indian agencies will study the FBI’s affidavit and any decision to question his “contacts” in India would be taken only after that. “We had knowledge of Fai’s activities and his links with separatist leaders like Umer Farooq and Geelani,” a senior government official said in New Delhi.
A host of persons, including journalists and some prominent people, had been invited by Fai to attend seminars hosted by his NGO in the United States.
The security agencies are also keen to examine Fai’s possible role in “diversion” of ISI funds for anti-national activities in India, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir.
The affidavit submitted in the US court alleges that though the KAC claimed to be a Kashmiri organisation run by Kashmiris and financed by Americans, the KAC was one of three “Kashmir Centres” that are actually run by elements of the Pakistani government, including the ISI. The two other Kashmir Centres are in London and Brussels.
The FBI documents in court also identified Fai’s four ISI handlers and made public their phone numbers and email IDs. The alleged handlers in Pakistan were identified as Brigadier Abdullah; Javeed Aziz Khan aka “Rathore”; Abdullah aka “Nizami Mir”; and Touqeer Mehmood Butt aka Sohail Mahmood, who goes by the nickname “Mir”.
Since June 2008, Fai contacted them over 4,000 times till his arrest. Between 2006 and early 2011, Javeed Aziz Khan contacted Fai for nearly 2,000 times, the FBI said in a 43-page affidavit.
It said Brig. Abdullah was the ISI officer responsible for handling Kashmir affairs. Fai acted at the direction of his handlers from the ISI, court documents said.
In the course of executing the searches, investigators found the “1999 Strategy Document for the Kashmiri American Council, Washington, DC USA” and documents with similar titles for 2000, 2001, 2005 and 2006.
These documents described the Kashmiri American Council’s plans to provide information to US administration officials, to use the US Congress to highlight the Kashmir issue, offset the Indian lobby and increase political pressure on both the US and Indian governments. Fai provided similar documents to his handlers in 2008 and 2009, the FBI said.
Court-authorised physical searches of Fai’s residence and storage facilities revealed 22 letters written by him to Zaheer Ahmad, another US citizen charged along with Fai, on a near-monthly basis between December 2003 and April 2006.
Those letters contained balance sheets accounting for the money Fai had received to date during that fiscal year, the identity of the individuals who had sent him the money and how much, and the amount Ahmad still needed to send to Fai.
They reflected that Ahmad was to transmit around $314,500 to Fai in 2003; in 2004, 2005, and 2006, the totals were $505,000, $525,000 and $447,000 respectively.
According to an FBI estimate, the total amount sent from the Pakistan government through Ahmad and his funding network to Fai and the KAC since the mid-1990s is at least $4 million.