SOPORE, Aug 5: Several hundred Muslims took to the streets in Indian-held Kashmir on Friday to call for the lifting of a death sentence imposed on a man convicted of conspiracy in a deadly 2001 raid on India’s parliament. India’s Supreme Court upheld Thursday a 2003 high court verdict sentencing Mohammed Afzal to death for conspiring to stage the raid, in which five gunmen stormed the parliamentary complex before being slain by security forces.

The march was led by Yasin Malik, head of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which wants Kashmir to secede from India. He said the execution could cast a cloud over peace talks between India and Pakistan.

“As we’re talking peace, there should be no room for hangings,” Malik said, appealing to India’s President Abdul Kalam to commute the sentence. Marchers cried: “Release Azfal. He is innocent.”

In upholding the death sentence, the Supreme Court said there was no doubt about his complicity in the attack plot. In Srinagar, meanwhile, witnesses said police fired teargas to disperse several dozen demonstrators calling for Afzal’s death sentence to be lifted. Separately, police chief Gopal Sharma told a news conference that six men suspected of being involved in three car bomb blasts had been arrested. The blasts had killed 16 people and injured 75.

“We have arrested six people involved in three major car-bomb blasts in Srinagar,” he said. Sharma said four men were arrested on Friday in different parts of Kashmir. Two others were arrested earlier in the week. The police chief alleged the suspects belonged to the militant group Hizbul Mujahedin.

“We are conducting raids to arrest two more militants who have been masterminding these attacks,” Sharma said, adding one of them is a Pakistani. —AFP