DPA/Islamabad

A Pakistani Islamist leader led funeral prayers in Pakistan for the man executed by Indian authorities over his involvement in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, according to a news report yesterday.

Ajmal Kasab, who was 24, had confessed to having links with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), an outlawed militant group founded by Hafiz Saeed.

Saeed led a crowd of thousands in offering funeral prayers for Kasab at the conclusion of a convention of his supporters in the town of Muridke, in Pakistan’s eastern province of Punjab on Friday, Urdu-language Express newspaper reported.

Jamat-ud-Dawah, the political arm of the LeT headed by Saeed, denied the reports, saying the gathering had offered funeral prayers in absentia for “innocent martyrs” of Burma, Gaza and occupied Muslim lands.

“We have detailed recordings of the whole programme. These are mere media speculations (and) nothing else,” the banned group said on Twitter.

Kasab’s hanging and burial in the Indian city of Pune on Wednesday received a muted response from the Pakistani government and the public. But Taliban militants hailed him, saying he had done “the right thing.”

Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan has asked India to return the body of the former militant to Pakistan. “We know how to take revenge,” he warned.

The three-day siege of India’s commercial capital in November 2008 killed 166 people, among them foreign nationals. Kasab, the lone survivor among a group of 10 militants, was sentenced to death in 2010 and his plea for clemency was later rejected.

 

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