Israel,US slam release of Mumbai attacks mastermind Lakhvi

[Lord ZeN]

The US, France and Israel have joined India in criticising the release on bail of LeT commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the alleged mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, with Washington saying it was “gravely concerned” by the development.

Shortly after Lakhvi walked out of a jail in the Pakistani garrison city of Rawalpindi on Friday, the issue figured in talks between French President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is in Paris.

Hollande described the release of the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s operations commander as "deeply shocking".

The US State Department said it had conveyed its concerns over Lakhvi’s release to Pakistan as recently as Thursday and urged Islamabad to deliver on its commitment to prosecute those responsible for the Mumbai attacks, which left 166 people dead, including six Americans.

“We are gravely concerned about the release on bail of alleged Mumbai attack mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. We have communicated that concern to senior Pakistani officials over the course of many months,” State Department spokesperson Jeff Rathke told a news briefing on Friday.

“Pakistan has pledged its cooperation in bringing the perpetrators, financiers, and sponsors of the Mumbai terrorist attacks to justice, and we urge Pakistan to follow through on that commitment to ensure justice for the 166 innocent people, including six Americans, who lost their lives,” he said.

Rathke refused to comment on possible “consequences or repercussions” if Pakistan failed to act against those who carried out the attacks on India’s financial hub in November 2008.

“I’m not going to put a timeline on it…But certainly, bringing the perpetrators of the Mumbai terrorist attacks to justice is a key priority,” he added.

The US’ close ally Israel too expressed surprise and disappointment at the release of the terror mastermind.

Israel’s ambassador to India Daniel Carmon described it as a setback for international efforts in the war against terror in which India and Israel are close partners.

“Israel is surprised and disappointed by the release of Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the mastermind of the Mumbai attack in which, as part of the horrific attack, also Israeli nationals and a Jewish centre - the Nariman House - were targeted,” he said.

“This release is a setback for the international efforts in the war against terror in which India and Israel are close partners.”

The attacks on the Jewish centre had left six people dead including rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife.

In Paris, French President Hollande said the release of a terrorist accused of a heinous crime such as the Mumbai attacks as “deeply shocking.”

French lawmakers too described Lakhvi’s release as “unfortunate” and said the development was not good for India or the world. The issue came up when Modi met a delegation of lawmakers led by National Assembly president Claude Bartolone.

“In this context, twice the French delegation raised the issue of the unfortunate release of the terrorist Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi in Pakistan…They strongly expressed their solidarity for India as it tackles the scourge of terrorism which knows no boundaries,” said external affairs ministry spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin.

During a joint media interaction with Hollande after their talks, Modi said: “There is a need for global action to deal with terrorism. All nations should commit that they will not provide shelter to terrorists but punish them.”

Soon after Lakhvi was released on the orders of the Lahore High Court, India had accused Pakistan of adopting a “dual policy” in dealing with terrorists. The Indian envoy in Islamabad met the Pakistani Foreign Secretary and registered the country’s strong concerns.

The envoy said the development “reinforced the perception that Pakistan has a dual policy on dealing with terrorists and those who have carried out attacks or are posing a threat to India are being dealt with differently and emphasized that this is a most negative development in so far as bilateral ties are concerned”, Akbaruddin said in a statement.

Lakhvi, who was arrested a week after the Mumbai attacks, was freed after the Islamabad High Court and Lahore High Court suspended his detention under a Pakistani law. He was earlier granted bail by the anti-terrorism court hearing the Mumbai attacks case in December.

US, Israel slam release of Mumbai attacks mastermind Lakhvi
US, France, Israel Condemn Pakistan’s Release Of Alleged Mumbai Attack Mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi

 

[Ryuzaki]

Lakhvi was Mossad,CIA,Raw agent

 

[Jf Thunder]

Israel and US, should mind their own business

 

[root]

Great India should be happy now have a good sleep.

 

[WAJsal]

Needed evidence to put him in jail . On speculations one can't put him in jail ,India should have at least provided us with some evidence .What a joke , FO blames India for Lakhvi’s release - Pakistan - DAWN.COM
Where did Israel come from?

 

[SipahSalar]

Take this France (If you know what i mean)

 

[metronome]

Pakistan is anyway considered to be a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists, this does help their image.

 

[The BrOkEn HeArT]

Pakistani Govt. Will never learn how to treat a terrorist. It will never work dual policy on terrorism. I think Pakistan will put him behind bar only then when the same terrorist will blow some pakistani head.

 

[WAJsal]

Pakistani Govt. Will never learn how to treat a terrorist. It will never work dual policy on terrorism. I think Pakistan will put him behind bar only then when the same terrorist will blow some pakistani head.

You stupid idiot . Does the justice system in India convicts someone just on speculations , provide evidence . If India had enough evidence against him ,they would have shared it with the world . Over hype.

 

[Aamna Ali]

A free Lakhvi will assist Pak self-destruct: Our strategy should be 'talk, plot, wait'


The release of 26/11 mastermind and Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi is not something we should keep wringing our hands in despair about. Pakistan is never going to bring him to justice for the simple reason that he is a creation of the core Pakistani state – which is not civil society, but the army and the ISI.

The right response from India should be composed and collected, and run something like this: “While we are saddened by the release of Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the man responsible for the killings of around 170 people in Mumbai in 2008, we acknowledge that the task of making him to pay for his crimes is currently that of Pakistan, in whose territory the 26/11 terrorist plot was hatched and master-minded. The evidence for his conviction for the crime of terrorism lies both in Pakistan and in India. If Pakistan wants to convict Lakhvi, it can find the evidence at home since the LeT, of which Lakhvi is commander, is based there. Preventive detention of Lakhvi without looking for and providing local evidence will always be subject to court scrutiny. We are thus not surprised that a court has set him free. India, for its part, will focus on bringing him to justice in India, whenever possible, as we have the evidence to nail him. India is always willing to provide the evidence to Pakistan, as we have done in the past. We will continue to talk to the government of Pakistan consistently and continuously to get justice done.”


PTI image

India should accept that no court in Pakistan can keep a man in jail forever purely on the basis of preventive detention laws. And Lakhvi has spent nearly six or seven years in jail - with special privileges, including conjugal rights. This has been done largely for global optics, to show its US patron that it is hard on terror, when the reality is that Pakistan is mollycoddling the anti-India group of terrorists. Keeping Lakhvi in jail through political pressure is pointless. Ask yourself: if Lakhvi is a creation of the Pakistani state, why would the mere fact of his being in jail limit his ability to plot terror? Lakhvi can direct his next terrorist operation against India from prison, and he will even have plausible deniability on it. His alibi will be that he could not have plotted any terror since he was already in custody!

In fact, we should forget about getting the Pakistanis to nail him and instead find a way to nab him and bring him to justice in India - even if it takes five years to launch a covert operation for this. If nothing else, we should quietly leak stories suggesting that India has sent two assassination squads led by disaffected Baloch and Sindhi rebels to capture or kill him on our behalf. Let Lakhvi spend his remaining years worrying about his life instead of living it up in a fake prison.

The one thing we should not do is keep bringing up Lakhvi's bail with Pakistan - which unfortunately we have done in a kind of Pavlovian response to his release yesterday (10 April). Nothing pleases the Pakistanis more than India displaying its impotence about 26/11's chief perpetrator.

The kneejerk political reaction to the Pakistani recalcitrance would be to suspend talks - but we should never do that. We should instead give Pakistan that privilege by persisting with talks all the time and frustrating them by yielding nothing substantive in these sessions. The sole purpose of talk is optics and more talk - to show the world we are reasonable people. Consider how long China has prolonged border talks without allowing any forward movement. Sometimes talk may yield results – in the form of easier visas, or more trade, but reciprocity should be the name of the game. Talking does not mean conceding more to Pakistan than what they are willing to concede to us. Talks will succeed only when the will of the Pakistani state to support terrorism against India is sapped or defeated. But there is no sign of that at all.

So, talk we must, even if we achieve nothing. In fact, we should use the Lakhvi release to launch the next round of talks where we can focus on terrorism and present our evidence again – but with the full knowledge that nothing will come of it.

Remember Salman Bashir, former Pakistani ambassador to India? When he was foreign secretary, he had contemptuously dismissed the dossiers we presented on 26/11 as mere “literature.” Nothing thrills a Pakistani more than putting us down. So we should not give them further pleasure on this score.

The problem is we have allowed the Pakistanis to play the game their way – which is to keep lying and pretending they want a good relationship with us, and all that stands in the way is the Kashmir issue. We start believing that “this time it is different”, and we end up signing worthless agreements in Shimla, Lahore and Agra, which finally end in the dustbin. Pakistan talks only if it is in a difficult situation (9/11, 26/11), and once the immediate peril has passed, it reverts to its old jihadi strategy.

To be sure, India is not the only one making the same mistakes repeatedly. The US too has been led up the garden path by Pakistan, but the difference is we are next-door. America does not usually have to pay too high a price for its mistakes. We do. The idea that Pakistan is somehow an ally in the war on terror, and also a victim, has been repeatedly bought by foolish bureaucrats in the US state department – as evidenced in the recent decision to offer nearly $1 billion in military aid to buy attack helicopters and missiles. Are missiles going to be used against the Taliban or India?

The truth is Pakistan will not end its antagonism of India even if we offer them a deal on Kashmir. As C Christine Fair, author of a book on Pakistan’s army, said in an interview to The Times of India last year, "Pakistan is an ideological state. The Kashmir issue is not causal, it's symptomatic. If there were to be any kind of negotiation on Kashmir that gives up any inch of territory, it is not going to fix the situation."

In a more recent post, Fair notes that the Pakistanis have managed to paint themselves as victims of terror and suckered the US government to pour even more money into that terror headquarters. She notes that in return for nearly $31 billion in aid and transfers to Pakistan since the early 2000s, all the US got in return was the deaths of thousands of American, allied and Afghan soldiers and civilians due to covert Pakistani support for violent Islamic jihadis and the Taliban.

Terrorism is official state policy in Pakistan. She writes in a recent blog: “This sort of behaviour has become Pakistan’s standard operating procedure. Since 1947, Pakistan has used Islamist militants in an effort to wrest Kashmir from India. It has used Islamist militants in Afghanistan since 1974, if not earlier. Since 1990, Pakistan has introduced extremely lethal groups such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT, now operating under the name of its above-ground wing Jamaat-ud-Dawa, JuD) and Jaish-e-Mohammad into the Kashmir theatre and elsewhere in India. Since 2002, according to the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, these two groups have killed more than 1,132 persons and injured more than 2,423 in about 162 attacks.”

Fair, in fact, points out that Pakistan has developed tactical nuclear weapons not to defend itself, but to deter India from any kind of short-term reprisals when the next major terror attack is unleashed by the likes of Lakhvi and Masood Azhar. Put another way, it means Pakistan’s nuclear strategy is to enable terrorism, not defend the country.

It is time we woke up to this reality. Our simple Pakistan policy should be four-fold: talk, plot, defend, wait. We should talk endlessly and use soft words to describe the possibility of solving all our mutual issues, including poverty, terrorism, etc. We should plot more covert operations and gather intelligence in Pakistan, and especially against the likes of LeT and Lakhvi. We should defend ourselves as best we can against terrorism - but it will never be foolproof. And we should wait. Give Pakistan 15-20 years and its blind hatred of India can only lead to some form of self-destruction.
As counter-terrorism expert : “From a geo-strategic perspective, as far as India is concerned, Kashmir is a holding operation, even in the absence of an effective competitive strategy. If India holds on to Kashmir for another 15 or 20 years, Pakistan will destroy itself, even without India doing anything substantial to secure this end.”

We should wait for Pakistan to self-destruct – unless, through an unexpected miracle, it corrects itself and truly wishes peace. But when 9/11 did not change Pakistani attitudes, I would not bet even one paisa on this possibility.

Let’s be clear. We have no stake in keeping Pakistan united when the Lakhvis, the LeTs, the Jaishes and the Taliban are busy rending it apart. A Lakhvi outside jail won’t be able to plot any more anti-India terror than what he could have done anyway from jail.

We will serve our own interests better if we let Pakistan implode under the weight of its own contradictions. Lakhvi will get it there faster.

 

[The BrOkEn HeArT]

You stupid idiot . Does the justice system in India convicts someone just on speculations , provide evidence . If India had enough evidence against him ,they would have shared it with the world . Over hype.

you are most stupid ignorant like all those people who support terrorism on the name of Jihad. Had India got some personal problems with Lakhwi ??? India and US provided enough evidences on 26/11 against him. The world knows it. But only pakistani people cant see it because he killed Indians on the name of jihad. But wait soon you will collect all evidence against him when he blow some pakistani heads too.

 

[Hasbara Buster]

These same Americans and Israelis support the same terrorists in Libya, Syria, Iraq and beyond...


Hello? Wake up ladies and gentlemen, stop paying attention to Western bu.llshitting.

 

[WAJsal]

Had India got some personal problems with Lakhwi ??? India and US provided enough evidences on 26/11 against him.

Do share them , and only India provided so-called evidence not US , don't drag them in .

The world knows it. But only pakistani people cant see it because he killed Indians on the name of jihad. But wait soon you will collect all evidence against him when he blow some pakistani heads too.

Dude we are more than happy to put him behind bars but provide evidence , if they are strong enough share them with the world , make them public .

you are most stupid ignorant like all those people who support terrorism on the name of Jihad.

Don't get personal , next time i'll report you .

 

[xyxmt]

you are most stupid ignorant like all those people who support terrorism on the name of Jihad. Had India got some personal problems with Lakhwi ??? India and US provided enough evidences on 26/11 against him. The world knows it. But only pakistani people cant see it because he killed Indians on the name of jihad. But wait soon you will collect all evidence against him when he blow some pakistani heads too.

World had no evidence and India thinks because they say so should be enough. Provide evidence or shut the F up, Pakistan doesn't care what French say when they are setting up a stage to sell the plane that no one buys and Israel yeah we care about Israel...US is only doing lip service, they know that with the evidence provided by India no court will convict him.

 

[killerbee1]

seems pakistan will never learn. why there is so much ignorance and double standards in Pakistanis policy against terrorism?