Unable to control LED through GPIO on Raspberry Pi 2

I am using a Raspberry Pi 2 with Raspbian Jesse running OpenHab. I installed older openHab since 2 has issue with the GPIO bindings. But even after following all documented steps and installing the GPIO bindings, I cannot turn on LED, although if i do echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/direction the LED fires up, indicating my hardware connection is correct.
I am completely a newbie to both Openhab and Linux systems, so can anyone please tell me where I might be going wrong?