Bail to Lakhvi and Its Impact on India

By Deepak Parvatiyar

April 13, 2015

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Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the suspected mastermind of the 26/11 Mumbai attack and top Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) commander, has yet again been released on bail by a Pakistani court. His release on the morning of 10 April is the third time in less than four months that the dreaded UN-designated terrorist has been granted bail by the Pakistani courts.

It was on 18 December 2014, when a Pakistani anti-terror court in Rawalpindi granted the bail to Lakhvi for the first time. The bail had been granted to Lakhvi against a bond of PKR 500,000 by an anti-terrorism court just two days after the Peshawar school massacre wherein 132 children and nine staff were killed by Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

However, strong protest from India forced Pakistan to reorder his detention the very next day.

Thereafter, on 8 January 2015, he was granted bail in a six-year-old kidnapping case by an Islamabad court against a surety bond of PKR 200,000. However, he could not be released then as he was detained in Adiala Jail under Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) for a month.
This time though, he was released after his detention was declared void by the High Court.

Lakhvi still faces trial – along with six other suspects – over the Mumbai attacks that saw 10 Pakistani gunmen going on a rampage and killing 166 people. The only survivor gunman, Ajmal Kasab, who was later hanged, had named Lakhvi in his testimony. However, Lakhvi’s release suggests that the evidence provided by India is not enough and that the court seeks more proofs from the prosecutors to convict Lakhvi.
The latest stand taken by the court is in contrast with what the then Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik did. He provided ‘graphic details’ of how a part of the Mumbai attack conspiracy was hatched in Pakistan.

India Expresses Concern Over Lakhvi’s Release

The court’s decision has come as a major embarrassment and severely challenges Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s resolve to tackle terrorism. On 24 December 2014, he had reached an agreement with Pakistan’s political parties and announced setting up of special military tribunal courts to handle terrorism cases so as to clean “this entire region” of terrorism and ensure that “there will be no differentiation between “good” and “bad” Taliban…”

Lakhvi’s arrest now re-emphasises the unholy yet symbiotic relationship between Pakistan’s ‘state players’ with ‘non-state players (read LeT and Jamaat-ud-Dawa)’, who play an undeniable role in Pakistan’s proxy war against India.

In December, when Lakhvi was first granted bail, the Pakistan government had attributed the bail to ‘technical error’ because ‘there were no arguments in court’. However, an important question that was raised then was that why should the anti-terror court be convened during the state mourning and bail be granted to a terrorist in such haste?

The matter had become more intricate considering the public prosecutor’s charge that many more witnesses were yet to be produced before the court. Even more curiously, Lakhvi and six other co-accused had filed bail applications just a day after the Peshawar terror strike and at a time when lawyers were observing strike to condemn the terrorist attack.

Obviously, the timing of the bail had raised more questions. Yet, it was only expected to happen any time given the discomfiture of the Pakistan establishment with the case involving Lakhvi.

This time again, the bail and subsequent release of Lakhvi proves this point. A BBC report from Islamabad suggests that apparently, most of the evidence was not made part of the case record in the Pakistani court and this indicated ‘perhaps lack of interest on the part of the Pakistani authorities’. The report further quotes ‘intelligence community’ that links the release of Lakhvi to the Pakistan’s intentions of not hurting the ‘morale of Kashmir-focussed insurgents’ operating from Pakistani soil.

Pakistan’s Reluctance to Frame Lakhvi

It may be mentioned that Pakistan had been perennially reluctant to pursue this particular case and initially, even denied India’s claims that the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks were based in Pakistan. It was only after the USA’s intervention and an assertion by the then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Pakistan’s soil was indeed used by ‘non-state actors’ for the attack, that Lakhvi was finally arrested by the Pakistani troop after a brief gunfight from a terror camp near capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Muzaffarbad, on 8 January, 2009.
On 25 November, 2009, a Pakistani anti-terrorism court formally charged Lakhvi along with six other suspects, with planning and helping execute the Mumbai attacks by providing accommodation and training facilities to the attackers, and also rejected the bail pleas of some of the accused. All seven pleaded not guilty before the court.

Yet, the charge sheets were made after much delays and only after India accused Pakistan of not being serious in bringing the accused to book.

Still, Pakistan refused giving Lakhvi access to the American investigating agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for questioning and instead asked the FBI to submit questions that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) replied to after sitting down with Lakhvi.
Indeed, Pakistan has much to hide.

Pakistan’s Approach Towards Handling Lakhvi’s Case

The way the case has been handled thus far, too, only reflects such a motive.

It may be mentioned that the proceedings of the case had begun in 2009 at the Anti-Terrorism Court in Rawalpindi. However, within a year, the case was transferred to another anti-terrorism court in Islamabad.

Prosecution lawyers, witnesses and at times the judges received threats in this particular case. A senior prosecutor, Chaudhry Zulfizar Ali, was even shot dead by gunmen in Karachi in 2014.

In April 2014, however, proceedings came to a virtual standstill as the special judge of the ATC expressed his inability to conduct the trial for security reasons. In all, seven judges have been transferred since the trial began in 2009. For some transfers, no reasons are even attributed.
What is even more baffling is that the court had turned down the prosecution’s request for video conferencing than actual presence in the court because of the threats to the prosecutors and the witnesses.

It was finally on 29 October, 2014 that hearing finally took place under the eighth judge in this case with three witnesses deposing in the case. But still, over 40 witnesses were to be produced at the time when bail was granted to Lakhvi on 18 December.

Lakhvi’s Clout in Pakistan

It is time and again reported that Lakhvi still called the shots as Lashkar military commander from the jail. So much has been his indispensability to Pakistan’s military establishment in fostering trouble in India, that the then army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, had reportedly even ‘rebuffed’ an appeal from a senior U.S. official in 2011 to confiscate Lakhvi’s cellphone.

Obviously, these developments do lend credence to India’s claims that Pakistani ‘agencies’ have played a role in the Mumbai attacks. The bail to Lakhvi also implies that India’s case was not properly represented in the Pakistani court and the reasons are obvious. It needs to be interpreted in the light of the observations made by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and his predecessor Pervez Musharraf. According to them, the terrorist outfits were “deliberately created and nurtured” by past governments “as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives”.

Pakistan Still Continues to Patronise Terrorism

Like Lakhvi, the dreaded terrorist Hafiz Saeed also roams freely in Pakistan despite being in the USA’s most wanted list and having a prize on his head. After the Peshawar attack on 16 December, Saeed appeared on television to accuse India for the massacre of the children and vowed to take revenge.

Now, he has Lakhvi with him for company. This does not bode well for India, even though the USA, France and Israel have sided with it to question Pakistan over Lakhvi’s release
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