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| The Lakhvi story and Pakistan’s treachery | |
By Farooq Ganderbali
Not surprisingly, the Islamabad High Court has let Zaki-ur Rahman Lakhvi free. Lakhvi, the judges were acutely aware of, was the mastermind behind the Mumbai terrorist attack which killed over 170 persons in November 2008. Lakhvi is the operational commander of global terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) which is proscribed by the United Nations and several countries including India and the US.
What makes Lakhvi immune to prosecution in Pakistan when both its Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Army chief, General Raheel Sharif, leave no opportunity to boast that they were going after all kinds of terrorists?
Before exploring possible answers to this basic question which would reveal the true nature of the Pakistani state, it would be instructive to take a closer look at Lakhvi and his career in terrorism. Zaki-ur Rahman Lakhvi was a madrasa product from Punjab and was one of the first radically inclined young men from Pakistan to go to Afghanistan to participate in the `jihad` against the Soviet forces.
Reports suggest that Lakhvi travelled to Afgahnistan to become a mujahideen in a training camp run by a close associate of Osama bin Laden, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Sayyaf was a Pashtun warlord who had considerable support from Pakistan Army. Lakhvi was the first ISI recruit to join the mujahideen.
Lakhvi quickly rose through the ranks and became a mujahideen commander, tasked to train a bigger contingent of recruits from Pakistan. This core group of Pakistani mujahideen became the founding members of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) and Harkat-ul Jihadi al Islami (HuJI), both created with the connivance and support of Pakistan Army. It is a well known fact that LeT was born in Kunar where Lakhvi ran a mujahideen training camp. In fact, it was Lakhvi and his contacts within al Qaeda who seeded LeT and generated enough funds to set up the LeT headquarters in Muridke near Lahore.
After the Afghan Jihad, Lakhvi returned to Pakistan and was given the charge of setting up LeT. He was given the charge of Bait-ul Mujahideen or the House of Mujahideen in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan occupied Kashmir. It was here that LeT cadres were trained in different levels of guerrilla warfare. It was here that the 10 new recruits were sent to train for the Mumbai 2008 attacks. Lakhvi became the ISI manager in LeT which was headed by a religious preacher, Hafiz Saeed. Saeed’s appointment, once again done by Pakistan Army, was at the behest of his patrons in Saudi Arabia. Lakhvi was not initially happy with this arrangement but remained content with heading the operational command at Bait-ul Mujahideen.
The fact about his soured relationship with Hafiz Saeed came into open when the latter, after the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, decided to shift LeT to Kashmir and rename Markaz-ud Dawa wal Irshad (MDI), the parent organisation created in the camps run by Lakhvi in Afghanistan, as Jamat-ud Dawa. Lakhvi and his friends were angry with the Saeed move to outsource jihadi activities to another of his confidants, Maulana Kashmiri, cutting off Lakhvi from resources and funds generated, in large measure by him, in the name of Kashmir Jihad. Lakhvi declared that he was setting up another group .
But the ISI intervened quickly and resolved the differences between Lakhvi and Saeed, giving the autonomous charge of the operations to Lakhvi. Lakhvi was also gifted a Pajero to drive around and a satellite phone to communicate directly with his ISI handlers. His handlers were in the rank of Brigadiers and there are plenty of anecdotes which shows ISI Brigadiers visiting Lakhvi at Bait-ul Mujahideen in Muzaffarabad.
After the Mumbai attacks, the ISI tried to protect Lakhvi for several days but with the international pressure mounting on the government to show results, Lakhvi and five others were arrested and sent to prison. In the midst of the global outcry, ISI played a devious game—it did not register any FIR against the accused, which meant that Lakhvi and others were not charged with any crime when they were detained. The FIR was filed three months later, exposing the prosecution to inevitable failure during the legal proceedings. It was a deliberate ploy and it worked, going by the manner in which the courts have been quick to release Lakhvi first on bail and then imposing conditions on the state before launching new prosecutions against the terrorist mastermind. It is difficult to believe that the state of Pakistan was not aware of the gaping legal loopholes which favoured Lakhvi.
The growing suspicion that the state, both the military and civilian sides, were clearly aware of the prosecution failings and failed to take any corrective steps to prevent the courts from throwing the case out. First the state kept on adding new charges to the FIR which was filed three months after the incident. Second, the key charges relied on the testimony of Ajmal Kasab who was tried and sentenced to death by an Indian court. Obviously, such a testimony would not have passed the muster in a foreign court, in this case Pakistan. Kasab was executed by the Indian authorities foreclosing the possibility of examining the testimony in any manner. Of course, in between the state indulged in the farce of sending a team of lawyers to India to gather evidence and corroborate the testimony. Then, for no rhyme or reason, the prosecution produced a witness from Okara, where Kasab and Lakhvi come from. This witness, a school principal, said Kasab was alive and was living in Okara. The trial court as well the high court was quick to grasp this `testimony` to suggest that the prosecution charges were false and framed.
Third, the prosecution decided to call over 100 witnesses of which 50 deposed in the last six years provoking the court to comment that it would take another 10 years for all the testimonies and cross-examinations to conclude. Fourth, lawyers kept changing and there were times when the state could not decide on any lawyer to represent the state in the case. This meant that for several weeks the state went unrepresented, allowing courts to adjourn the case. Even judges changed midstream, delaying the proceedings even further.
While all this was going on, Lakhvi was enjoying a good life inside the prison. He entertained visitors, had a mobile phone to talk freely, a television set, a wifi connection and best of delicacies nd other amenities which other criminals would not dream of. His visitors could come any time and were neither scrutinised nor checked by the jail authorities. Lakhvi even enjoyed conjugal rights and fathered a child during his prison stay.
Now that Lakhvi can no longer be held, he would swagger out of the prison in the glare of television cameras while General Sharif and Prime Minister Sharif would be busy telling their friends in Washington and Beijing that India was behind all this confusion. Pakistan, they would argue, was committed to eliminating terrorism!!
(The author is a Freelance Journalist and columnist)
(Opinions expressed in write-ups/articles/Letters are the sole responsibility of the authors and they may not represent the Scoop News)
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