New Delhi: For five-and-a-half minutes, the killing paused as Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist Imran Babar struggled to memorise a propaganda message he was relayed on a call from Karachi. “We want all the Muslims in Indian prisons to be released,” Babar intoned, half-sentence by half-sentence. “Muslim states should be handed back to Muslims. The army should be withdrawn from Kashmir, and Kashmiris should be given their rights. The land on which the Babri Masjid stood should be handed over to Muslims, and the mosque rebuilt.”
Ever since 2012, the man alleged to have tutored the 26/11 attacker in a voice-over-internet line—and the only alleged perpetrator, who is an Indian national—has been held in prison in Mumbai. The trial of Zabiuddin Ansari has, however, been stalled for six years because of a stay imposed by the Bombay High Court.
Even as prosecutors in Mumbai prepare to begin the trial of Tahawwur Rana, the 26/11-accused Canadian-Pakistani immigration consultant deported from the US on Wednesday, the stalled trial is a reminder of how elusive justice has proved for the 169 children, women and men killed that day.
The case against Ansari cannot proceed until the Bombay High Court rules on a petition by the Delhi Police. The police claim that documents relating to Ansari’s travel from Saudi Arabia to India in 2012 are privileged. A sessions court had earlier ordered the police to produce the documents. The case was last heard in April 2018.
The Indian in the control room
The son of an insurance agent and the only brother to four sisters, Ansari grew up in modest circumstances. He graduated as an electrician from the Indian Technical Institute in Maharashtra’s Beed and worked briefly before joining a graduate course at the Government Degree College in Aurangabad.
Police sources told ThePrint that he then worked for a while before a graduate course at the Government Degree College in Aurangabad. There, he is alleged to have become active in the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
Later, police said that Ansari travelled with his college friend Fayyaz Zulfikar Kagazi to Karachi through Kathmandu in the autumn of 2005 to meet with senior Lashkar commanders.
The meeting followed a months-long effort by the Lashkar to raise a cadre within India. Led by Aslam Sardana, a cleric working at Falah-e-Darain seminary at Tarkeshwar, a small circle of Islamists began recruiting would-be jihadists, using the widespread resentment against the 2002 communal massacre in Gujarat to recruit cadres.
Fahd Husain, one of three men from the Aurangabad group in which Ansari was involved, was killed during army operations in the Hil Kaka region in 2004. The whereabouts of two others from the Beed area, Nisar and Asad Ansari, remain unknown. Kolhapur resident Irfan Moinuddin Attar died in a shoot-out on the outskirts of southern Kashmir’s Tral town in May 2006. Gujarat’s Ayub Damarwala was also believed to have been killed at this time and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere south of the Pir Panjal range.
To help this new cohort of jihadists stage operations in their homeland, the Lashkar dispatched a consignment of 16 assault rifles, 4,000 rounds of ammunition and 43 kg of plastic explosives packed inside computer cases. The consignment was, however, intercepted on the basis of information provided by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) on 9 May 2006. Ansari, who had been following in another car, succeeded in escaping.
Following the dramatic car chase, police sources familiar with the case say, Ansari caught a train to Kolkata, where he took refuge with friends he knew from his Islamist circle in Aurangabad. Then, he crossed the border into Bangladesh, where he was provided with a fake passport and Pakistani visa by a Lashkar operative. Then, he travelled to Karachi, where he spent six months at a Lashkar camp near Muzaffarabad.
Then, just before 26/11, he was summoned to a meeting near Thatta, a small town in Karachi. Ansari had joined the Lashkar to fight, but he had another skill that was more needed.
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The Chabad House killing
Following their attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai, Imran Babar took Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his six-month pregnant wife Rivka, and their child Moshe hostage. As planned, Imran was to call popular local television stations and convey demands. The men were to insist they were all Indian Muslims, acting with no ties to Pakistan or the Lashkar. The problem, recordings of the conversations between the Lashkar command room and Babar show, is that the Punjabi-speaking attackers—none with even a high school education—had been told what to say.
Ansari then provided rudimentary media training while his senior, Sajid Mir, continued to brief the attackers on tactical issues. Ansari’s ethnic origins were betrayed by the strong Deccani dialect he used, peppered with words like the controller used words like ‘Karenga’—characteristic Mumbai usage for the phrase ‘will do’—as well as ‘gathbandan’, in place of the Urdu ‘ittehad’, and ‘prashasan’, instead of ‘intezamiya’ or ‘hukumat’, for the government.
Testimony provided by Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving 26/11 terrorist who was hanged in 2012, had earlier provided some evidence of the involvement of an Indian in the attack. An Indian instructor they know as Abu Jundal, he told police in Mumbai, had attempted to teach the attack team rudimentary Hindi words.
Babar was ordered to identify himself as a resident of Hyderabad’s Toli Chowki area, a neighbourhood that produced several Lashkar-linked Indian jihadists, including Karachi-based commander Abdul Khwaja.
Following months of patient intelligence work, the IB located Ansari in 2012 in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, the Ri’asat al-Istikhbarat al-’Amah, however, demanded proof after Pakistan’s Embassy in Riyadh insisted the passport he held, identifying him as Riyasat Ali, was genuine.
Local police, sources have told ThePrint, finally resorted to subterfuge after Ansari’s parents declined to supply blood samples for DNA testing. Instead, they capitalised on a family dispute, in which one relative slashed at Ansari’s father with a knife. The blood from the knife was then sent to Saudi Arabia, together with a DNA profile.
This led to Ansari being summarily deported from Saudi Arabia in 2012—for which he is seeking documentation in order to be able to argue that the circumstances under which he was brought to India were illegal.
In the meanwhile, Ansari and his fellow conspirators have been convicted in the Aurangabad weapons-haul case. Appeals have been filed by several men sentenced in that case and are being heard in the Bombay High Court. Ansari has also gone on hunger strike at least once to protest what his lawyers say are inhumane solitary confinement conditions.
Lacking closure, victims wait
Following the media interactions, it soon became clear that the Indian government would not engage in hostage negotiations at Chabad House. Ansari was now taken off the line and replaced by Lashkar commander Mir. “Stand her up on this side of your door,” tapes record Mir telling Imran Babar, who had his gun trained on the pregnant Rivka Holzbert. “Shoot her such that the bullet goes right through her head and out the other side.” “Do it, in Allah’s name.”
Sajid Mir, the man who led the operation, is reported to have been convicted on terror-finance charges by a Lahore court but has not faced trial 26/11-related charges. Eighteen men identified by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency as having directly participated in the execution of 26/11 remain fugitives. Lashkar’s chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed is under house arrest but has also not been prosecuted for 26/11.
David Coleman Headley, the best-known of the 26/11 perpetrators, is in a US prison but protected by the terms of a controversial plea deal against facing prosecution in India.
Legal battles undoubtedly lie ahead as the Tahawwur Rana trial proceeds. The Canadian-Pakistani businessman’s lawyers argued, during his trial in Chicago, that the primary evidence came from a man even more directly involved in the 26/11 attacks, Headley. The Pakistani-American’s long, shadowy history as a Drug Enforcement Agency informant and his record of cutting deals with prosecutors to avoid punishment makes him a potentially toxic witness.
In efforts to avoid extradition, Rana, among other things, claimed he believed Headley was lawfully acting as an agent of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and that he was not made aware of its details. There is also evidence that suggests otherwise, though: In a December 2006 conversation recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Rana tells Headley that “the Indians deserved it.”
Fast-tracking the trials of Tahawwur Rana and Zabiuddin Ansari and ensuring that the prosecution is completed in a meaningful time frame won’t change the fact that dozens of perpetrators are still being shielded from justice by Pakistan. This could, however, prove a small step towards justice, if not closure.
(Edited by Tony Rai)