[On Dec. 13, 2001, five
gunmen entered the compound of India’s parliament and opened fire. A gunbattle
with security officers ensued and 14 people, including the gunmen, were killed.
India blamed the Pakistan-based militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and
Jaish-e-Mohammed.]
By Muneeza Naqvi
NEW DELHI, The Associated Press— A Kashmiri man convicted
in a 2001 attack on India’s parliament that left 14 people dead was hanged
Saturday after a final mercy plea was rejected, a senior Indian Home Ministry
official said.
Home Secretary R.K.
Singh told reporters that Mohammed Afzal Guru was executed early Saturday
morning at New Delhi’s Tihar prison.
“It was the law taking
its course,” Singh said.
Guru was given a Muslim
burial in the prison compound, Press Trust of India news agency reported. His
family in the India’s Jammu-Kashmir state has demanded that his body be handed
over, but that seems unlikely given the highly sensitive nature of the
execution.
Guru had been on death
row since first being convicted in 2002. Subsequent appeals in higher courts
were also rejected, and India’s Supreme Court set an execution date for
October, 2006. But his execution was delayed after his wife filed a mercy
petition with India’s President. That petition, the last step in the judicial
process, was turned down earlier this week.
Several rights groups
across India and political groups in Indian Kashmir have said that Guru did not
get a fair trial.
“Serious questions have
been raised about the fairness of Afzal Guru’s trial,” Shashikumar Velath,
Amnesty International India’s programs director, said in a statement. “He did
not receive legal representation of his choice or a lawyer with adequate
experience at the trial stage. These concerns were not addressed.”
Protests broke out
Saturday in at least four parts of Indian Kashmir, including the northwestern
town of Sopore, which was Guru’s home. Scores of protesters chanting slogans
including “We want freedom” and “Down with India” defied a curfew and clashed
with police and paramilitary troops, who opened fire. Four protesters sustained
bullet wounds and one of them was in critical condition, a senior police
officer said on customary condition of anonymity.
Thousands of police and
paramilitary troops fanned out across the state preparing for more protests and
violence following the announcement of the execution. A curfew was also imposed
in most parts of Indian Kashmir, and cable television channels were cut off in
the region.
About 30 Kashmiri
students and anti-death penalty activists clashed with Indian police and
right-wing Hindu groups in New Delhi. Most of the protesters were detained by
the police.
Police in Indian Kashmir
on Saturday also detained several leaders of the All Parties Hurriyat
Conference, an umbrella organization of separatist political and religious groups,
a police officer said on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to
speak to reporters.
The group called for
four days mourning in the disputed region and called Guru’s hanging “an attack
on the collective conscience of the Kashmiri people.”
“We appeal to the people
to rise in one voice and protest this aggressive act so that it’s known to
everyone that even if the heads of Kashmiris are cut, they’ll never bow under
any circumstances,” the group said in a statement.
The statement said that Indian
Kashmir’s chief cleric, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, who also heads the separatist
alliance, was detained in New Delhi and not allowed to travel to Srinagar, the
main city of Indian Kashmir. Another top separatist leader, Syed Ali Geelani,
was also detained in the Indian capital, according to news reports.
When Guru’s death
sentence was handed down by India’s Supreme Court it sparked protests in
Kashmir, and the state government has warned that his execution could
destabilize the volatile Himalayan region.
Anti-India sentiment
runs deep in Muslim-majority Kashmir, which is divided between Hindu-dominated
India and Muslim-majority Pakistan but is claimed by both nations.
There were a few small
protests against the execution in different parts of Pakistan on Saturday, none
larger than about 100 people. Jamaat-ud-Dawa, believed to be a front for the
anti-India militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, organized a rally of about 100
people in the southern port city of Karachi and another roughly half that size
in the capital, Islamabad. About 100 people protested in the main city of
Pakistan-held Kashmir, Muzaffarabad. The protesters held banners and chanted
slogans condemning India.
Since 1989, an armed
uprising in Indian-controlled Kashmir and an ensuing crackdown have killed an
estimated 68,000 people, mostly civilians.
The secrecy in which
Guru’s execution was carried out was similar to the execution in November of
Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunman of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Kasab was also buried in the western Indian prison where he was hanged.
On Dec. 13, 2001, five
gunmen entered the compound of India’s parliament and opened fire. A gunbattle
with security officers ensued and 14 people, including the gunmen, were killed.
India blamed the Pakistan-based militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and
Jaish-e-Mohammed.
The attack led to
heightened tensions between India and its neighbour and archrival Pakistan and
brought the neighbours to the brink of war, but tensions eased after intense
diplomatic pressure from the international community and a promise by
then-Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to clamp down on the
militants.
Guru confessed in TV
interviews that he helped plot the attack, but later denied any involvement and
said he was tortured into confessing.
Government prosecutors
said that Guru was a member of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a charge Guru denied.
Guru’s family said it
had not been told that he was about to be executed.
“Indian government has
yet again functioned like a fascist state and hanged him secretly,” said Yasin
Guru, a relative who lives in the family’s compound in Sopore. “They did not
have the courtesy to inform his family.”
@ The Globe and Mail
BAZAAR BOMB CLAIMED BY TALIBAN KILLS AT LEAST 11 IN NORTHWEST PAKISTAN
By Ismail Khan
BAZAAR BOMB CLAIMED BY TALIBAN KILLS AT LEAST 11 IN NORTHWEST PAKISTAN
[The
country’s lawless tribal regions have been a haven for the Pakistani Taliban as
well as other local and foreign militants, and as a result, they have been a
frequent target of Pakistani military action and American drone strikes. While
Pakistan’s Parliament has repeatedly demanded an end to the drone strikes,
Pakistani officials privately acknowledge their effectiveness.]
By Ismail Khan
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A
car bomb ripped through a town bazaar in northwestern Pakistan’s tribal belt on
Friday, killing 11 people and wounding at least 31, local officials said. The
Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility.
“People
were leaving a mosque and going to the bazaar when a remote-controlled device
planted in a vehicle went off,” Fazl-i-Qadir, an administrator for the Orakzai
tribal district, said by telephone.
A Pakistani
Taliban commander in Orakzai said his operatives had planted the bomb near the
bazaar in a village called Ferozkhel, local journalists reported. They quoted
the commander as saying that the targets were tribal elders who had helped
organize a militia to resist Taliban encroachment in the area. Several
elders were among the victims in the blast.
The
Pakistan Air Force has been conducting airstrikes against militant positions in
the thickly forested, snow-covered mountains of nearby Upper Orakzai, part of a
broader operation against Pakistani Taliban militants in the tribal belt that
borders Afghanistan.
Six
militants were killed and three of their bases were destroyed in the most
recent of those airstrikes, a senior security official said, speaking on the
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.
As part of
the anti-Taliban operations, security forces had cleared Ferozkhel of militants
and had allowed local tribesmen to resettle there.
Orakzai
once served as the headquarters of Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the
Pakistani Taliban, which unites several militant groups operating in the tribal
belt.
The
Ferozkhel blast came a week after Pakistani Taliban militants claimed
responsibility for a suicide bombing near a mosque in another northwestern
town, Hangu, that killed at least 26 people.
Pakistani
officials also reported on Friday that an American drone fired two missiles
into a compound in the Babar Mountains, on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan
in the South Waziristan tribal region, killing four people and destroying a
compound of the Pakistani Taliban. The identities of those killed and other
details were not clear from the account by the officials, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because American drone strikes are a politically
delicate issue in Pakistan.
The
country’s lawless tribal regions have been a haven for the Pakistani Taliban as
well as other local and foreign militants, and as a result, they have been a
frequent target of Pakistani military action and American drone strikes. While
Pakistan’s Parliament has repeatedly demanded an end to the drone strikes,
Pakistani officials privately acknowledge their effectiveness.