What the caught terrorist can do for India
The NIA will construct a foolproof case for India based on the testimony of Naved Mohammed, captured alive in the Udhampur attack.
| 3-minute read | 08-08-2015
- 522Total Shares
Naved Mohammed, captured at Udhampur on August 5 is not the first Pakistani terrorist to be caught alive. Since the sensational capture of the Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist Ajmal Kasab during the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, dozens of such foreign militants have been captured in Jammu and Kashmir. The Daily Excelsior newspaper reported on August 5 that 51 foreign militants are still lodged in the state’s jails. Two high profile recent cases in the tenure of the NDA government include Lashkar-e-Toiba militant Mohammed Naved Jutt, a resident of Multan, Punjab Province, captured in south Kashmir in June 2014 and Siddiqui, a Jaish-e-Mohammed Divisional Commander originally from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, in October 2014. Both sang like canaries about the role of the Pakistan army and ISI in running training camps.
Jutt, who trained with the 2008 Mumbai attacker Ajmal Kasab at the LeT’s Maskar Aksa camp in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) told J&K police about the LeT’s annoyance that their Mumbai assassins had left vital clues—a floating boat, a GPS handset and a live and chatty Ajmal Kasab.
Astonishingly, unlike Ajmal Kasab’s sensational revelations, none of these attackers ever got the media spotlight that Naved Mohammed did. Both cases were investigated by the state police and the ‘enemy combatants’ Jutt and Siddiqui, arrested under the J&K Public Safety Act. Over a hundred ‘Foreign Terrorists’ captured alive by Indian security forces since the dawn of militancy have since been released and gone back home to Pakistan. Three, including the notorious Maulana Masood Azhar, were released in exchange for the IC-814 passengers taken hostage in December 1999.
The investigations by state police are usually confined to a single incident. The banality of the arrests and investigations fails to capture the strategic dimensions of a cross-border war being waged against India. The arrests by the state police has also failed to highlight a tectonic shift in this war over the past decade. The foot soldiers for this long war come, not from Jammu and Kashmir, but like Faisalabad resident Naveed Mohammed, from the provinces of Pakistan. They are inducted and trained in camps run by the Pakistan army’s ISI before they are launched across the border.
The armed response to such terror attacks must be left to local police units who are first responders. Investigations, however, must be given to central agencies who will be able to establish the broader international dimensions of the conspiracy.
This is the context to see the home ministry’s August 6 decision to hand over Naved Mohammed’s case to the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The NIA, set up as a specialized terrorism investigation agency after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has transformed the terror investigation paradigm. It has eschewed old-fashioned police methods of torturing suspects to extract confessions in favour of sustained interrogations and investigations.
And, unlike the extracted confessions, which swiftly collapse in courts, none of the NIA’s chargesheets have so far been undermined.
You only have to read a list of over 100 superbly documented cases on the official website - from that of international gunrunner Anthony Shimray to the methodical investigation which unraveled the 2011 Delhi High Court blast - to know why they are different.
The agency has the ability to gather credible evidence to build up watertight cases which will stand the scrutiny of international law. It will doubtless, do the same in the case of Naved Mohammed.
No comments:
Post a Comment