January 9, 2006	Monday	Zilhaj 8, 1426

SRINAGAR, Jan 8: Police in occupied Kashmir said on Sunday they had freed the head of an Islamic women’s group who was arrested after she raided hotels, restaurants and liquor shops as part of a campaign to enforce morality. Asiya Andrabi, chief of the Dukhtaran-i-Milat (Daughters of the Muslim Faith), was arrested with six fellow activists on Sept 1 after the group’s Maryam Squad — named after the Virgin Mary — stormed suspected brothels and liquor shops to stop prostitution and what it called Kashmir’s moral decline.

“It (the high court) said the grounds of detention are legally unsustainable in the sense she had gone out for curbing something which was an evil against society,” said Andrabi’s lawyer, Mian Abdul Qayoom.

Police said Andrabi was freed from Srinagar’s central jail on Saturday evening. The six other activists of the separatist Dukhtaran-i-Milat were released a week after their arrest.

Andrabi, the wife of a jailed militant leader, and her fellow activists wear head-to-toe veils.

Her arrest had sparked protests in Kashmir, where more than 45,000 people have been killed in a Muslim separatist revolt since 1989.

Influenced by Iran’s Islamic revolution, Dukhtaran-i-Milat became active in Kashmir in the early 1990s when it launched a campaign against what it saw as obscenity in public places. It also calls for Muslim women to wear the veil.—Reuters