Pakistan jails alleged mastermind of 2008 Mumbai terror attack
LAHORE: The alleged mastermind of a deadly attack on India’s financial capital over a decade ago has been jailed in Pakistan for nearly six years on separate terror charges, his lawyer said Wednesday.
Hafiz Saeed was found guilty of ‘being part of a banned terrorist outfit’ and for ‘having illegal property’, his lawyer Imran Gill told AFP.
He is wanted in India for allegedly planning the shocking 2008 attack in Mumbai, when 10 Islamist militants armed with assault rifles, hand grenades and other weapons killed 166 people and injured hundreds more.
It took the authorities three days to regain full control of the city.
Lawyer Gill gave no details about Saeed’s conviction apart from saying he would be kept in prison in the eastern city of Lahore.
The firebrand cleric is considered a global terrorist both by the United Nations and the United States, which put a US$10 million bounty on his head.
He heads the Jamaat-udDawa Islamist charity, whose militant wing Lashkar-eTaiba (LeT) is believed by Washington and Delhi to be responsible for the Mumbai attacks.
The United States hailed the sentence against him.
The conviction ‘is an important step forward — both toward holding LeT accountable for its crimes, and for Pakistan in meeting its international commitments to combat terrorist financing,’ tweeted Alice Wells, the top US diplomat for South Asia.
India has long said there is evidence that ‘official agencies’ in Pakistan were involved in plotting the attack — a charge Islamabad denies.
Saeed has denied involvement, but has spent years in and out of varying forms of detention in Pakistan, sometimes under house arrest, on various charges.
For the most part he has been free to move at will around the country, enraging India which has repeatedly called for his prosecution. — AFP