1. Home
2. Defence

PAK'S CHARGE­SHEET IN CASE OF BLAST IN FRONT OF HAFIZ SAEED'S HOME RAISES MANY QUESTIONS

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 9/26/2022 1:00:57 PM

NEW DELHI,Sep 25 The filing last week of a charge-sheet by the Punjab (Pakistan) Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) in the investigation in the 23 June 2021 blast outside the Lahore-based home of the mastermind of the 26/11 Mumbai attack, Hafiz Saeed, has named three more individuals as among the accused—Samiul Haq alias Adnan, Aziz alias Ujair Akbar and Muhhamad Naveed Akhtar Khan. Apart from these three, in January the Anti-Terror Court, Lahore, had sentenced five other suspects—Eid Gul Khan, Peter Paul David, Sajjad Hussain Shah and Ziaullah—to death apart from handing down five years of imprisonment to a woman, identified as Ayesha Biwi for her alleged role in the car suicide bombing in which three people were killed. All these eight, who have been named as an accused in the more than one -year long investigations, are Pakistani nationals. During the whole investigation, in which several different departments of Pakistan’s law enforcement agencies took part, the name of Hafiz Saeed was never mentioned once in the official communication, with the officials merely referring to him as a “high-value target” possibly to avoid the embarrassment that comes with investigating an attack on one of the world’s most wanted global terrorists. The charge-sheet, has however, come as an embarrassment for Pakistan President Arif Alvi, then Prime Minister Imran Khan, then information minister Fawad Chaudhry and then Pakistani national security advisor, Moeed Yusuf, who all had blamed Indian government agencies for carrying out the attack on Saeed, ostensibly to avenge the Mumbai attack of November 2008 in which 166 people died. Yusuf, on 4 July 2021, while addressing a press conference in Islamabad had claimed that, “Through the forensic analysis, electronic equipment, which has been recovered from these terrorists.