Srinagar:
Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Tuesday said he wrote a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and also met him to request the return of Afzal Guru's body. He, however, said that he did not make this public as he wanted to avoid "playing politics" on the issue.
Mr Abdullah said this on a day when Opposition PDP patron Mufti Mohammad Sayeed released a letter that he wrote to the Prime Minister demanding the body of the Parliament attack convict be returned to his family for proper burial.
Afzal was hanged and buried in Tihar jail in Delhi on February 9 and there have been demands from his family that his body is returned to them.
"I had written to the PM on the 19th of this month asking for the return of the bodies of both Afzal Guru & Maqbool Bhatt to their families," Mr Omar tweeted on the microblogging site Twitter.
Mr Omar said he followed this up with a visit to the Prime Minister to make the request in person a few days ago. "My Government will continue to raise this issue with Delhi," he said.
"I had hoped to avoid playing politics with the body of Afzal Guru but that seems to be impossible to avoid with the Mufti Sayeed letter now.
I guess I should have played politics by making the letter public immediately but am glad the PDP has joined in support now," Omar Abdullah said in a series of tweets.