Mumbai, May 03: A 22-year-old Pakistani man who faces the death sentence if convicted for taking part in the 2008 Mumbai attacks that left 166 people dead is due to learn his fate in an Indian court on Monday.
Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, said to be the lone surviving gunman, was arrested after 10 militants went on the rampage in India’s financial capital on November 26, 2008.
India blamed the assaults, which targeted multiple sites around the city, on the banned Pakistan-based Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), straining already tense diplomatic ties with its neighbour.
Kasab, a school dropout from the Punjab region of Pakistan, is charged with a string of crimes including “waging war against India” and murder in connection with the siege that traumatised the nation.
Judge M.L. Tahaliyani has spent more than a month considering the evidence and is due to announce his verdict on Monday. Public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam told AFP last week that he was “100 percent” sure of a result on Monday.
It was unclear whether the verdict and sentence would be handed down simultaneously.
The prosecution believes it has overwhelming evidence — including DNA and fingerprints, security camera footage and photographs — that Kasab was one of the gunmen who killed 52 people in the city’s main railway station.
Kasab initially denied the charges, then pleaded guilty, before reverting to his original stance and claiming that he was set up by the police.
His lawyer, K.P. Pawar, has said the confession was “nothing but a manipulated and fabricated document of the prosecution” and that he had shown the “improbabilities” of the case against his client.
The end of the trial is a significant step towards the rehabilitation of Mumbai, badly shaken by the coordinated attacks on three luxury hotels, the main railway station, a popular tourist restaurant and a Jewish centre.
Outside the special court set up in a prison in central Mumbai, police set up roadblocks at either end of the street and commandos with rifles and bullet-proof jackets patrolled.
A long queue of journalists waited to enter the premises.
Many in India believed the trial was unnecessary given the seemingly overwhelming weight of evidence against the accused, but authorities insisted that the due legal process should run its course.
For the victims, a conviction will bring closure on 18 months of uncertainty, with many pushing for the death sentence to be carried out promptly.
“He should be hanged on November 26 so we can celebrate the anniversary every year,” the father of a nine-year-old girl shot in the leg in the train station told the Times of India newspaper on Monday.
Two Indian nationals are also standing trial. Fahim Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed are both accused of providing logistical support to the gunmen by supplying them with handwritten maps of the city.
Judge Tahaliyani refused to allow an application for US-Pakistani national David Coleman Headley, who admitted scouting out targets for the attacks, to give evidence.
Thirty-five people are named in court papers as co-conspirators, including LeT founder Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, key operative Zarar Shah and Hafiz Saeed, whose Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity is widely seen as a front for the the LeT.
Lakhvi and Shah are among seven suspects currently on trial in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.
Kasab, arrested in a stolen car after a shoot-out at a police roadblock, was the only suspected gunman caught alive. The others were killed by Indian security forces.
They were secretly buried earlier this year after a long-running row about how to dispose of the bodies.
Just over a week ago the worst-damaged hotel, The Oberoi, welcomed back guests for the first time since the attacks.
Peace talks between nuclear-armed neighbours and rivals Pakistan and India were suspended in the wake of the atrocity but tentative steps have begun towards resuming dialogue.
—Agencies