He poured his heart out in a letter to his daughter Azra from a jail in Lahore in April 1973. ``The Pakistani (ruling) clique has never had an interest in freedom for Kashmiris. They only talk and they should not be trusted,'' he wrote in reply to her complaint that despite Kashmiris' sacrifices for Pakistan, the country called them spies.

Butt's letters, written from different jails in Pakistan and finally from the Tihar jail in Delhi, where he was imprisoned for eight years before his execution, have been compiled by Mohammad Saeed Asad in a book Shaoor-e-Farda (Understanding of Tomorrow) and was published recently.

``Those very Pakistani rulers who felt no compunction in gunning down their own countrymen were now punishing Kashmiris,'' he wrote in his letter. Butt wasreferring to the massacre of people from the erstwhile East Pakistan by the Pakistani Army.

Mohammad Ashraf Qureshi, who gave an introductory note to the life and leadership of Butt, writes that Butt returned to Srinagar in 1976 in desperation when he became convinced that Pakistan could not be trusted. His return to Srinagar was an indication of his frustration with Pakistan: Here (in Srinagar) the High Court had already sentenced him to death for killing an Indian official and it was here that he managed to escape from jail.

Mohammad Ashraf Qureshi, who had hijacked an Indian Airlines plane from Srinagar to Lahore in January 1971, now teaches Kashmiriat in Punjab University. He discloses that the training for hijacking a plane was given by a former Pakistan air force pilot in Rawalpindi to Hashim Qureshi.

It was Maqbool Butt who chose Qureshi for this job, but after the hijacking Butt and his comrades received one shock after the other. The very first was the offer of an unlimited amount ofmoney to him from Pakistan occupied Kashmir's so-called president Abdul Qayyum Khan if he declared that the hijacking was a feat of the guerrillas of Al Mujahedeen--an organisation that Qayyum ran.

After this Butt and others were tortured in the Shahi Qilla of Lahore and other jails notorious for torture devices. When they were released from jails, then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto offered to make Butt prime minister of occupied Kashmir if he joined his Pakistan People's Party (PPP).

Butt realised Pakistanis was making fools of Kashmiris and fled to Srinagar in 1976. That turned out to be his last journey.