AFP/Islamabad
A Pakistani anti-terror court yesterday charged seven suspects in connection with the Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people one year ago, a defence lawyer said.
The men were indicted at the court in a high security prison in the city of Rawalpindi on the eve of the first anniversary of India’s worst militant attacks, which dramatically soured relations with rival Pakistan.
All those in the dock pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The seven people Pakistan arrested over the November 26-29 siege on India’s financial capital included the alleged mastermind of the operation, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, and alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative Zarar Shah.
“All seven of them have been indicted, including Lakhvi. The accused pleaded not guilty as the evidence does not support the charges,” lawyer Shahbaz Rajput said by telephone.
“They have been indicted under the anti-terrorism act and the Pakistani penal code,” said Rajput, without elaborating.
India and Washington blamed the deadly Mumbai rampage on Pakistan’s banned militant group LeT. The attacks stalled a fragile four-year peace process between the two nuclear-armed south Asian rivals.
In Washington for a state visit this week, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called on the world to pressure Pakistan to rein in extremists.
US President Barack Obama said he believed Pakistan was making progress in fighting extremism.
The nuclear-armed Muslim nation is locked in offensives against Taliban militants in the northwest and has historically funded anti-India groups.
Yesterday’s indictments come a week after India handed Pakistan more information about the attacks, which New Delhi blamed Pakistani “official agencies” for abetting. Islamabad flatly denies such charges.
Court proceedings have taken place behind closed doors with journalists barred from the hearings and defence lawyers leaking only small details.
“We will defend them. The next hearing is December 5,” said Rajput.
New Delhi has been pressuring Islamabad to speed up a probe of Pakistani militants blamed for the 60-hour siege that saw 10 heavily armed gunmen target luxury hotels, Mumbai’s main railway station, a restaurant and a Jewish centre.
Repeating India’s stance, junior foreign minister Shashi Tharoor told parliament that Pakistan had failed to provide the “necessary cooperation in bringing the perpetrators of what happened last year to justice”.
According to news agency Press Trust of India, the latest information handed to Pakistan included statements of key witnesses, including a magistrate and FBI officials, from the trial of the lone gunman to survive the attacks.
The gunman, Mohamed Ajmal Kasab, has confessed to his involvement in the attacks in a dramatic announcement to a court in Mumbai.
Pakistani security agencies have detained a former army officer for possible links with two men arrested in Chicago on terrorism charges, an army spokesman said yesterday.
David Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana were arrested last month and accused of planning an attack on Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which ran objectionable cartoons in 2005, sparking protests by Muslims in several countries.
Rana is a Pakistan-born Canadian citizen while Headley is an American citizen who had spent time in Pakistan, which is under US pressure to crack down harder on militants along the border with Afghanistan to help it put down a Taliban insurgency there.
Pakistani military spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said a former army major was detained in connection with the case.
“He’s still in detention and is being questioned,” he said, adding that no serving officer has been detained in the case.
According to US court documents, the Chicago pair discussed their planned attack on the Danish newspaper with members of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group and Al Qaeda-linked Pakistan-based militant Ilyas Kashmiri.
Lashkar, blamed for the 2008 Mumbai assault, also talked to them about possible attacks in India and suggested these should be given priority over the alleged plot in Denmark.
Lashkar has denied links with the Chicago arrests.
Once nurtured by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to fight India in Kashmir, Lashkar shares Al Qaeda’s concept of global jihad, as underscored by its alleged willingness to support the planned attack in Denmark.
Officials have long worried that Lashkar could use its big network of support in the Pakistani diaspora to hit Western targets.
Pakistani authorities officially banned Lashkar after it was blamed for a 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.
But analysts say it is unofficially tolerated as it is not believed to have been involved in attacks inside Pakistan, where the government is fighting Taliban militants.
Pakistani authorities put seven Lashkar members on trial for their links to the Mumbai violence that killed 166 people, while the group’s founder, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, was briefly put under house arrest.
Authorities also closed the offices of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a charity headed by Saeed, after the UN said it was a new alias for Lashkar and put it on a terrorist list in 2008.
However, JuD has apparently re-emerged under the name Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (Foundation for Welfare of Humanity), and its cadres were involved in relief activities for people displaced by an army offensive against Taliban militants in Pakistan’s northwestern Swat valley in May. It has also launched a weekly newspaper, Jarrar (Brave). |
