By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: India has formally asked Pakistan to hand over Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the leader of a banned Islamist group accused of masterminding the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people, officials from both countries said Friday.
India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said at a news briefing in New Delhi that India had sought Saeed’s extradition for his involvement in the Mumbai attacks, which India blames on Saeed’s group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
“India has formally requested Pakistan to extradite Hafiz Saeed, suspected of involvement in the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, for trial in India,” Bagchi said, according to Reuters.
The request came as Saeed is serving a 33-year prison sentence in Pakistan for terrorism financing charges in two separate cases.
“Pakistan has received a request from the Indian authorities, seeking extradition of Hafiz Saeed in a so-called money laundering case,” Pakistan’s foreign office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said in a statement.
She added that no bilateral extradition treaty exists between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, who have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947.
The two countries have not held any formal talks since 2015, and their relations have deteriorated further in recent years over the disputed region of Kashmir, which both claim in full but rule in part. India revoked the semi-autonomous status of its part of Kashmir in 2019, angering Pakistan and sparking protests and violence in the Muslim-majority region.
Saeed, who founded the radical group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in the 1990s, was arrested in 2019 by the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) of Punjab province, and was convicted in two cases of terrorism financing in 2020 and 2022. He has been in and out of jail in Pakistan over the past decade, facing various charges and court cases.
His conviction was seen as a sign of Pakistan’s compliance with the demands of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global watchdog that monitors money laundering and terror financing.
Pakistan was listed in in FATA in 2018 because of “strategic counter-terrorist financing-related deficiencies”. The country was removed from the list in October 2022.
Saeed has denied any involvement in the Mumbai attacks, which targeted luxury hotels, a train station, a Jewish center, and other sites in India’s financial capital. The United States and the United Nations have designated him as a global terrorist and offered a $10 million bounty for information leading to his conviction.
Saeed is also the head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a charity that he claims is dedicated to Islamic welfare and relief work. The US and India, however, allege that JuD is a front for LeT and its militant activities.
Pakistan has banned both LeT and JuD, and has frozen their assets and barred them from collecting donations.
Copyright © 2021 Independent Pakistan | All rights reserved
