Mumbai attacks
July 29, 2011
The lone surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks that left 166 dead has approached the Indian Supreme Court asking for his death sentence to be overturned, a court source told AFP Friday. The source said the request by Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab had been filed via jail authorities in Mumbai, where he has been held since the attacks.
Pakistani national Kasab, one of 10 Islamist gunmen who laid siege to the city for nearly three days, was first convicted and sentenced by a trial court in the Indian commercial and entertainment capital in May 2010.
The death sentence was confirmed by the state high court in February in the first failed appeal by the 23-year-old school dropout from a poor farming area in Pakistan's Punjab state. Kasab was found guilty of a string of offences including waging war against India, murder, attempted murder and terrorist acts after a trial at a maximum security prison court in Mumbai.
Trial
During the trial, the prosecution produced fingerprints, DNA, eye-witness accounts, surveillance footage and other evidence showing him opening fire and throwing grenades in the bloodiest episode of the November 26 attacks at Mumbai's main railway station.
Three luxury hotels, a popular tourist restaurant and a Jewish centre were also targeted by the other gunmen. A number of senior police officers, including the head of the Maharashtra state anti-terrorism squad, were killed as the gunmen fled the scene of carnage.
If the Supreme Court upholds the verdict and sentence, Kasab can appeal for clemency to India's president as a last resort.
Pakistani judicial commission
India has accused the banned, Pakistan-based Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba of being behind the attacks, which led to the suspension of fragile peace talks between the two neighbors and rivals.
A Pakistani judicial commission will be in India in about a week to record the statement of key individuals involved in the Mumbai terror attacks case, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Thursday.
"We have registered an FIR [First Information Report] against Ajmal Kasab. Our legal experts will go to India in a week or 10 days," Malik said, while addressing the International Institute for Strategic Studies on "Countering Extremism in South Asia." The commission seeks to take statements of Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate RV Sawant Waghule, who took the confessional statement of Kasab, investigating officer Ramesh Mahale and the doctor who carried out the post-mortem examination of the terrorists.
Rare cases
India has the death sentence for the "rarest of the rare" criminal offences and executions are uncommon. The last execution in India was in 2004, but in May India's president unexpectedly rejected a mercy petition from a murderer in the northeastern state of Assam. The state faces a difficult search for a hangman, however, because the small number of known candidates have either died or retired.
Author: Shivani Mathur (PTI, AFP)
Editor: Sarah Berning