Srinagar, Oct. 27: After intense political wrangling, Kashmir’s longest incarcerated and most controversial detainee, Farooq Ahmad Dar alias Bitta Karate, walked free today.

Karate, blamed by the minority Pandit community for a string of killings of its members, was arrested on June 2, 1990.

Pandits have been fiercely opposing his release but an anti-terror court last week granted him bail, arguing there is “no justification in continuation of his incarceration when other co-accused facing the same allegations are enjoying fruits of liberty”.

On his release, Karate (in PTI picture) struck a reconciliatory note by supporting the peace process between India and Pakistan. “We support the composite dialogue between India and Pakistan but they should also talk to the real representatives of Kashmir for a durable solution,” he said.

At his Guru Bazar locality in Srinagar, hundreds of people joined Karate’s reception, shouting pro-freedom slogans.

Before joining militancy, Karate, against whom 23 FIRs — mostly related to murder — have been lodged, was a martial arts practitioner, which fetched him the alias of Karate.

What earned him the wrath of Pandits was his “confessional statement” run by the official media soon after his arrest, accepting his role in the killings.

Since then, there had been stiff opposition to his release, prompting the government to repeatedly slap the Public Safety Act — which provides for detention without trial for a maximum of two years — on him, every time his term expired.

When the Congress-People’s Democratic Party (PDP) coalition came to power in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002, a number of undertrials — some detained for over a decade — were set free but Karate was the only exception.

Most separatists, including his parent party Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, were also not espousing his cause for several years because of negative publicity.

Only a few years ago, some of them, particularly a splinter JKLF group led by Javed Mir, strongly supported his release. Karate today joined this group and Mir said he would work for the release of undertrials languishing in jails.

The chances of his release became brighter after Panther Party chief and lawyer Bhim Singh pleaded his case.

“I received a letter from him in 1999, saying that the door of justice has been closed on him. He also said he has spurned violence,” Singh said.

“In 2000, I took up his case and some years later, the PSA (Public Safety Act) was quashed by the Supreme Court but he was not released. I continued to pursue his case.”

Singh, who received hate mails for pleading the case, said the act was slapped eight times on Karate in succession.

“My argument in the court was that there should be no detention without trial,” he said. “In his case, no chargesheet was produced.”