By Seekriti Saha
On Monday, December 1, 2025, an alleged absconder named Shafat Ahmed Shangloo, who was involved in 1989’s abduction of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of the then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). He was arrested in the Nishat area of Srinagar.
According to CBI, Shangloo had conspired with Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front’s chief Yasin Malik, who is currently behind the bars of Tihar jail in Delhi.
On the kidnapper’s demand, the Central government agreed to release five JKLF terrorists (Sher Khan, Abdul Hamid Sheikh, Noor, Altaf Ahemed,Javed Ahemed Jargar and Mohammad Kalwal) in exchange for the freedom of Rubaiya Sayeed. This event emboldened the terrorists of the IC 814 hijack of Kandahar. The five hijackers were members of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a Pakistan-based Jihadist group. Among 179 passengers and 11 crew members, only 27 were released, along with the body of a male hostage who was stabbed by one of the hijackers multiple times. The Indian government sent a team of negotiators and agreed to release three terrorists named Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar in exchange for the rest of the hostages.
The then chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah, was against both the incidents of terrorism. Omar Abdullah, son of Farooq Abdullah and National Conference leader, said, “This is the second time my father was forced to release people. With Rubaiya Sayeed and families of the hijacked victims, they used the Rubaiya Syed incident as the benchmark. They said when you could release terrorists for a home minister’s daughter, is our family not precious? Why is it only she is precious to the country? Then if she is precious to you, then our family is precious to us. So we set a benchmark that had to be followed.”
In December 1989, Rubiya Sayeed,six days after Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was sworn in as the union Home Minister, her daughter and the then medical intern were abducted while she was returning from a minibus. She was set free after 5 days upon the release of the jailed militants.