NEW DELHI: The arrest of Ghulam Nabi Fai “was long overdue”, a report quoted India's home secretary as saying on Saturday.
Fai, 62, a US citizen detained on Tuesday, is suspected of links to a decades-long effort that allegedly funnelled millions of dollars to Washington to lobby US politicians on behalf of Kashmiri causes.
Commenting on Fai's arrest, India's Home Secretary R.K. Singh said: “Yes, his arrest was long overdue,” the Press Trust of India reported.
Fai has been a prominent figure in the politics of Indian-administered Kashmir, racked by a more than two-decade insurgency against New Delhi's rule.
Kashmir is split between India and Pakistan but both countries claim the Himalayan territory in full.
The US Justice Department said Fai and Zaheer Ahmad, 63, a US citizen and a resident of Pakistan, face five years in prison if found guilty.
The US complaint alleges Fai and Ahmad conspired illegally as Pakistani agents, falsifying and concealing material facts that they had a duty to disclose in dealings with the United States government.
The allegations, which come amid increasingly strained ties between the United States and Pakistan, centre on the Kashmiri American Council (KAC), a Washington-based group founded in 1990.
“We had a fair degree of suspicion that the money he (Fai) used to get was given by the agencies in Pakistan,” Singh said on the sidelines of a regional security conference in the Bhutanese capital Thimphu.
The KAC is suspected of being run by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Pakistan supports Kashmir's right to self-determination.
India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir since their independence from British rule in 1947.
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