G
eo News anchor Kamran Khan, in his November 12, 2012
programme, revealed that Pakistani officials had told Antiterrorism
Court Judge Chaudhry Habibur Rehman on November 10, 2012 that terrorists
who attacked and killed over 166 innocent people in Mumbai on November
26, 2008, belonged to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and that they had trained in various cities of Pakistan.
The mastermind of this attack, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, is under trial at Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi.
Five inspectors of the Crime Investigation Department (CID) deposed
before the court that the terrorists had been trained in camps located
in Mansehra, Muzaffarabad in Azad Kashmir, Khairpur, Thatta, Lakro and
Gadap Town in Karachi. This was a big revelation striking at the base of
the ‘media war’ between India and Pakistan, during which the world
correctly divined that the Indian media was more credible. Why did the
FIA, which is prosecuting Lakhvi, decide to come clean?
One reason was the surrender to India by Saudi Arabia of Syed
Zabihuddin Ansari, alias Abu Jandal, an Indian-born member of the LeT,
who escaped from Pakistan after the Mumbai attack on a Pakistani
passport. According to a deposition of the only terrorist captured in
Mumbai, Ajmal Kasab, Abu Jandal was present in meetings in Karachi
preparatory to the attack. Abu Jandal, after landing in India,
implicated members of the Pakistan Army and the ISI agency in the
planning of the attack.
Those who have seen the
National Geographic documentary
on the Mumbai attack should now be informed that the man who was on the
phone talking to the Pakistani killers was this man, Abu Jandal. This
nom de guerre is a favourite of the LeT, indicating acceptance of crime
committed in the name of high faith.
In the July 2005 issue of the monthly
Herald, Zulfiqar Ali
described one of the terrorist camps in Mansehra where al Qaeda had
interface with our jihadi organisations, including the LeT. The news in
2001 that the Mansehra camp had been disbanded was mere exaggeration.
Before Osama bin Laden was finally made to live in Abbottabad, he
thought he could be comfortable in Mansehra where al Qaeda was lending a
hand.
One Pakistani journalist who lost his life telling the truth about the Mumbai attack was Saleem Shahzad. In his book
Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11
(Pluto Press 2011), he wrote that it was al Qaeda who planned the
Mumbai attack “through former Pakistan Army officers with help from the
LeT without the knowledge of the ISI despite the fact that LeT was on
ISI’s leash”. He wrote further:
“The Mumbai operation was actually the revival of an old ISI plan.
The idea was to deflect the Pakistan Army away from Waziristan and get
it to fight India instead. This nearly succeeded: Pakistan’s militant
leaders Mullah Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud announced that they would
fight alongside Pakistan’s armed forces in an India-Pakistan war and the
director general of ISI, Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, confirmed this
understanding in his briefing to national and foreign correspondents
when he called Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud Pakistan’s strategic
assets” (p.95).
After the US got hold of documents from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad
safe house establishing a communication link between him and Hafiz
Saeed, it moved in 2012 to the final decision to place a bounty of $10 million on Hafiz Saeed.
What is behind this ‘outing’ of Hafiz Saeed now? One reason the
Indian press has given is Islamabad’s “keen desire to normalise
relations between the two countries which came close to war in the
months following the attacks”. The other is Hafiz Saeed’s defiance of
policy-change in Rawalpindi.