Islamabad
reacted with anger to media accounts of Headley's claims about the ISI. But the
case of the Kanpur spy suggests that a great part of the truth about Mumbai is
either unknown to, or is being hidden from, Pakistan's civilian
government...
Last week, the former Indian diplomat, Chinmaya Gharekhan, called on
the government to test Pakistan's commitment to act against anti-India
terrorists by using “quantifiable criteria which can be spelt out.” Pakistan's
willingness to fill the gaping holes in its investigation will clearly be key to
these criteria. Early this year, Mumbai authorities quietly buried the bodies of
the nine Lashkar jihadists, who were killed during the attacks, after months of
waiting for Pakistan to reclaim them. Eighteen months after the carnage, the FIA
has identified just three of those men: Mohammad Altaf, Imran Babar, and Nasir
Ahmad. Nothing could better illustrate Pakistan's disinclination to discover the
truth about Mumbai. --
Praveen Swami
By Praveen Swami
May 17, 2010
Why Islamabad seems disinclined to discover who was responsible for
the November 2008 carnage.
Waqas Ahmad was among the hundreds of Lahore cricket fans who crossed
the Wagah border five years ago to watch their country play India in New Delhi.
The 2005 India-Pakistan series had been advertised as a historic event; the
embodiment of hope that a new era of peace was about to dawn on South Asia. For
most of the Lahore fans, the long journey was worth it: Pakistan registered a
159-run victory at the Feroz Shah Kotla stadium before tens of thousands of
spectators, among them Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pervez
Musharraf.
But Ahmad didn't make the match — and never caught the train home.
The story of the cricket fan who disappeared, improbably enough, holds out
disturbing new evidence that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate
might have played a direct role guiding the Lashkar-e-Taiba's murderous,
November 2008 attack on Mumbai.
LeT jihadist Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab's conviction by a Mumbai court
this month has been hailed as bringing a closure, or at least something
resembling it, to the kin of 164 people who were killed and the 308 injured in
the carnage. Later this month, an anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi will begin
hearing prosecution arguments against seven men Pakistan's Federal
Investigations Agency says helped to finance, facilitate and execute the
attacks. It is unclear just when Judge Malik Akram Awan will deliver his verdict
but many hope his judgment will not just serve justice but also help the fraught
relationship between the two countries.
What it almost certainly won't do is reveal who engineered the
carnage and why.
The Uttar Pradesh police located Ahmad last summer at Bithoor on the
outskirts of Kanpur. Neighbours knew him as Rajesh Kumar. Ahmad had obtained a
driving licence and a voter-identification card to support his ‘fiction,' the
term spies use for their cover-identities. Investigators allege that Ahmad was a
covert ISI operative, tasked with recording the movements of Indian military
units. A grade X dropout, the 25-year old Waqas was recruited by the ISI, say
the police. Following a year of training in spycraft, he was despatched to watch
out for military movements across northern and western
India.
For months, no one outside the intelligence community in New Delhi —
and few within it — paid attention to Ahmad's story. He was, after all, a bit
actor in the ISI's India operations. This spring, though, after the United
States' Federal Bureau of Investigations began to share details of the
interrogation of Pakistani-American jihadist David Coleman Headley, Ahmad's
story gathered a startling new significance. The phone number he used to contact
his handlers for funds, it turned out, was among those Headley had used to speak
with three serving Pakistan Army personnel who, he told the FBI, had helped
organise his mission to carry out the reconnaissance that would lead the
Lashkar's assault team to its targets in Mumbai.
Islamabad reacted with anger to media accounts of Headley's claims
about the ISI. But the case of the Kanpur spy suggests that a great part of the
truth about Mumbai is either unknown to, or is being hidden from, Pakistan's
civilian government.
Gaping holes
Early last year, after weeks of denying that its nationals had any
role in Mumbai, the Pakistan government finally ordered its Federal
Investigation Agency to act. The Lashkar's second-in-command, Zaki-ur-Rahman
Lakhvi, is now being tried in Rawalpindi along with the organisation's head of
operations targeting India, Mazhar Iqbal; the head of the communication cell who
facilitated the Mumbai operation, Abdul Wajid; and Karachi-based cadre Hammad
Amin Sadiq and Shahid Riaz Jamil. In July last, the FIA also held Jamil Ahmad
and Muhammad Younis Anjum, who it says helped organise funds and communications
for the attack.
But ever since the FBI charged Headley with having conducted the
reconnaissance operation in Mumbai, doubts have mounted on the integrity of the
investigation in Pakistan. In February, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram
bluntly charged Pakistan with “hiding the real culprits.”
Perhaps the most important gap in Pakistan's investigation is the
absence of any detail of just who carried out pre-attack reconnaissance — and on
whose orders. Kasab told the Mumbai police that the assault team was shown
detailed videotape of the targets. Headley, the FBI's investigation shows,
harvested that footage. His operation, however, finds no mention in the trial
now under way in Rawalpindi. Nor was it mentioned in a July 2009 dossier handed
over to India by Pakistan. The dossier stated the suspects the FIA had arrested
“admitted their guilt and their contribution in planning, preparation,
financing, arranging boats, logistics, training, facilitating and launching.”
Presumably, the FIA would have asked them questions on the reconnaissance issue
— but chose not to share its findings with India.
From Headley's testimony to the FBI, it is evident that he was not
the first Lashkar operative engaged to undertake reconnaissance in Mumbai.
Before his first, September 2006 visit to India, Headley was shown a cardboard
mock-up of the Taj Mahal Hotel and asked to conduct surveillance on its second
floor, which, among other things, housed the closed-circuit television. Early on
during the November 26, 2008 strikes, the attackers were able to locate the room
and destroy the surveillance system — a move which successfully made efforts to
track their movements in the hotel difficult.
In an April 13, 2009 questionnaire to investigators in India, the FIA
sought details of the alleged Lashkar operatives, Fahim Arshad Ansari and
Sabahuddin Ahmed. No further requests for information on the two men followed.
First held in February 2008 on charges of facilitating multiple terrorist
operations, the two men have since been cleared of the Mumbai-related crimes.
Likely, the FIA knew they were innocent all along. Had the U.S. not held
Headley, the truth might never have emerged.
The second major gap in the FIA investigation is this: it tells us
next to nothing about Lashkar commanders who used satellite phone connections
and voice-over-Internet connections from a still-undetermined location in
Pakistan. FIA analysts, the July dossier states, determined that three suspects
— Riaz, Sadiq and the still-fugitive Mohammad Amjad Khan — were in contact with
one another, and with an unidentified cellphone number, through the attacks. The
assault team also called the unidentified number from a satellite phone. Jamil
Ahmad and Anjum, the FIA says, helped to acquire this satellite phone. But the
FIA is yet to tell the world who used the unidentified number, who was in the
control room and where it was.
By the FIA's account, the communication cell was controlled by Mazhar
Iqbal, using the code-name ‘Zarar Shah.' Pakistan has, however, refused to give
India voice samples which would establish whether Iqbal was indeed among the
individuals guiding the assault team. The Indian authorities have also been
denied photographs of Wajid, which would allow the Mumbai police to confirm his
identity. Nor has the FIA offered information on a Hindi-speaking suspect,
likely an Indian national, who helped to guide the attack.
Thirdly, the FIA investigation offers little insight into the
training of the assault team. The July dossier offers no detailed account of the
camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Lahore where the team was trained.
Nor has the FIA been able to arrest other jihadists who trained with the group.
Pakistan claims it has been unable to locate the key Lashkar operative,Muzammil
Bhat, who is alleged by the Mumbai police to have overseen the training of the
group. But in December 2009, journalists Adnan Khan and Michael Petrou,
reporting for the Canadian magazine, Macleans, located Bhat at a Lashkar
facility near Muzaffarabad. “He was in constant contact with our brothers
carrying out the attack,” a Lashkar operative they interviewed said, “[h]e was
giving them instructions as the operation progressed.”
Finally, Pakistan's July 2009 dossier dealt at some length with the
question who financed the attacks — but the FIA has chosen not to prosecute most
of those who put up the cash. Sadiq and Jamil Riaz, the FIA found, had admitted
to having opened accounts with the Mehran Cooperative Bank and the Allied Bank
branches in Karachi. The FIA investigators found, the dossier states, “that
various LeT activists and office-bearers transferred funds to their account from
Khanewal, Gujranwala, Multan, etc., for terrorist activities and operations in
Mumbai.” None of those office-bearers has, however, been charged with this
crime.
Last week, the former Indian diplomat, Chinmaya Gharekhan, called on
the government to test Pakistan's commitment to act against anti-India
terrorists by using “quantifiable criteria which can be spelt out.” Pakistan's
willingness to fill the gaping holes in its investigation will clearly be key to
these criteria. Early this year, Mumbai authorities quietly buried the bodies of
the nine Lashkar jihadists, who were killed during the attacks, after months of
waiting for Pakistan to reclaim them. Eighteen months after the carnage, the FIA
has identified just three of those men: Mohammad Altaf, Imran Babar, and Nasir
Ahmad. Nothing could better illustrate Pakistan's disinclination to discover the
truth about Mumbai.
Source: The Hindu, New Delhi
8:43 AM
Sultan Shahin
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