Jammu and Kashmir police have arrested two of the last few remaining separatist leaders who were out of jail, reviving a three-decade case of rioting in Srinagar.

The police said they had arrested Javed Ahmad Mir, former chief of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), and Shakeel Bakshi, a key separatist ideologue.

An official said the duo surrendered before a Srinagar court before being taken into custody as “part of an ongoing effort to investigate and bring closure to long-pending cases that date back to the height of militancy in the 1990s”.

Javed was part of the group of four JKLF commanders, known by their acronym HAJY where the initials stand for Hameed, Ashfaq, Javed and Yasin.

The group had played a key role in the rise of militancy in the late 1980s.

The four, along with Bakshi, were part of the Islamic Students League, whose leaders spearheaded the militancy.

Security forces killed Ashfaq and Hameed in the initial years while Yasin Malik is in Tihar, facing life imprisonment for leading an agitation following Hizb commander Burhan Wani’s death in 2016.

The police said Javed and Shakeel were arrested in connection with an FIR filed at the Sadr police station of Srinagar in 1996 over protests against the killing of Hilal Beg, the founding commander of the JKLF’s student wing (SLF), that had rocked the city.

The protesters had alleged that Beg was killed in custody.

The SLF later changed its name to Ikhwan ul Muslimoon, which was involved in high-profile killings and kidnappings in the early 1990s. The crowd participating in Beg’s funeral had turned violent after the police tried to stop them.

“The case under FIR number 192/1996 was registered under Sections 341, 148, 336, 332 of the Ranbir Penal Code (RPC), along with Section 7/27 of the Arms Act and Section 13 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, after violence erupted during a funeral procession on July 17, 1996,” an official said.

“The arrests have been made to conclude and present a chargesheet in long-pending cases.”

The police said apart from Javed and Bakshi, separatist leaders such as Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Abdul Gani Lone, Shabir Shah, Mohammad Yaqoob Vakeel and Nayeem Ahmad Khan had provoked the mob. Geelani, Lone and Vakeel have since passed away while Shah and Khan are in jail in terror-funding cases.