PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti today took a dig at Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi over the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, and said he was "selectively" picked up for execution.
"The Congress is pointing fingers at BJP and taunting them about Guru and now the killers of Rajiv Gandhi. It was Congress which hanged Guru and it should have shown more humanitarian face to the people of Jammu and Kashmir," Mehbooba told reporters here.
Referring to Gandhi's remarks that the killers of Rajiv should not be released from jails, she said, "Unfortunately Rahul had thought that it was correct to pick a man from the 28th place in a list and hang him."
"Under the Constitution, those awarded death sentence are allowed to meet their family, but in case of Guru, he was not allowed to meet his family," she said.
Mehbooba said, "Congress was criticising BJP over the Afzal Guru issue, but who has hanged him... It was Congress."
"We passed a resolution in the Assembly for return of the body to his family in Kashmir, but Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde did not take two days to throw it in the dustbin saying it would deteriorate the situation here," she said.
"Did the Congress now know that the situation in Kashmir will deteriorate if you pick Afzal Guru from 28th place and hang him to death in the dead of night without allowing him to meet his family?" she asked.
"Congress and BJP are playing drama over these deaths and Jammu and Kashmir has been made as a sacrificial goat," she said.
Reacting to the issue, ruling NC leader and MLA Mustafa Kamal said, "Soon after the attack on Parliament, Farooq Abdullah (NC chief) had said that Afzal Guru was not at the place of incident."
"The Centre kept J&K Government in dark over the hanging of Guru," Kamal said, adding that the "Supreme Court created a controversy by commuting death sentence to life imprisonment. If the killers of Rajiv go scot-free, it will create a question mark on this big institution".
