New Delhi: Four days after 26 tourists were killed in the Pahalgam terror attack, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had said his country was willing to take part in a “neutral, transparent and credible” investigation into the massacre.
While India is yet to respond to this officially, it has tried the option of cooperating with Pakistan in the past to investigate terror attacks, with little success.
From allowing a judicial committee to record statements and cross-examine witnesses of the 2008 Mumbai terror attack, to taking an investigation team from Pakistan to the site of the Pathankot airbase attack in March 2016, India has tried at least twice to seek Pakistan’s help in bringing the perpetrators of such crimes to justice.
The 10 terrorists who carried out the four-day carnage in 2008, in which more than 160 people were killed, were all members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The same outfit is believed to have orchestrated the Pahalgam attack. In the 2016 Pathankot attack, Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) was reported to have been involved.
Former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan Sharat Sabharwal believes that Pakistan’s offer to participate in a neutral investigation is a “diversionary tactic”. Instead, India should investigate the attack thoroughly and share evidence with its key allies to ensure Pakistan is held accountable, he told ThePrint.
Sabharwal was posted in Islamabad between April 2009 and June 2013, when India had handed out dossiers to Pakistan on the terrorists behind the 26/11 attack. Pakistan had launched an “investigation” and started a “judicial process”.
“The proposal for a neutral probe is a diversionary tactic. In the past, Pakistan has blatantly denied its involvement even in the face of hard facts. We should gather all possible evidence, share it with our key partners and hold Pakistan accountable,” Sabharwal said.
Here’s a look at how previous joint probes by the two nations have fared.
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26/11 attack eyewash
Under immense pressure from the international community after the Mumbai attack in November 2008, Pakistan on 7 December that year detained over 20 operatives and senior leaders of terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa from a training camp in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir.
Over the next year, till November 2009, India shared at least seven dossiers with Pakistan containing information on Lashkar operatives behind the attack in Mumbai.
The first of these dossiers was shared in January 2009, the same month Pakistan announced that it had constituted a three-member committee of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to probe the case. The committee was headed by the agency’s additional director general, Javed Iqbal.
Pakistan went on to demand more information and access from the Indian government to the sites of the attack as well as a joint investigation.
The first admission of involvement of Pakistani nationals came when the FIA arrested and booked eight suspects, including then number two in the LeT Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, and the terror group’s communication expert Zarar Shah, based on info provided by India. They were booked under sections of the nation’s 1997 Anti-Terrorism Act, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Ordinance 2008, and sections of the Pakistan Penal Code.
India had identified Lakhvi as the Mumbai attack mastermind, while Shah was suspected to be the primary handler of the terrorists who had unleashed terror in Mumbai.
In November 2009, then Minister of State for External Affairs, Shashi Tharoor, informed Parliament that between January and November, Indian authorities had shared a total of seven dossiers with Pakistan, the last of which was shared the same month.
The same month, FIA chargesheeted seven suspects—Lakhvi, Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hamad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed, and Ahmed Younis Anjum—for involvement in the 2008 attack. Trial commenced in a Rawalpindi anti-terrorism court against these seven accused.
In November 2010, then Minister for External Affairs S.M. Krishna informed Parliament that Pakistan had proposed sending an eight-member judicial commission to India to record statements of the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate and the Chief Investigating Officer, who had recorded the confession of terrorist Ajmal Kasab, and the two doctors who had conducted a post-mortem exam of nine other slain terrorists.
The commission visited India from 14 to 21 March, 2012, and recorded the statements. However, their cross-examination was denied.
In March 2013, India stated that “substantive and verifiable progress” had not been made in the trial of the 2008 terror accused in Pakistan, despite its extensive cooperation.
In May that year, FIA prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali, who was dealing with the Mumbai terror attack case and assassination case of former Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto, was shot dead in Karachi.
The Pakistani judicial commission again visited Mumbai in September 2013 and cross-examined four witnesses whose statements had been previously recorded.
In December 2014, Lakhvi was granted bail by a Pakistani court, causing outrage in India. The next day, he was detained again under the Maintenance of Public Order. The Islamabad High Court suspended his detention, an order that the nation’s Supreme Court later overturned. Lakhvi was released from jail on bail in April 2015.
In August 2015, in an opinion article for Pakistani national daily Dawn, former FIA DG Tariq Khosa conceded that dilatory tactics by the defendants, frequent change of trial judges, assassination of the case prosecutor as well as retraction from original testimony by some key witnesses had been serious setbacks for prosecutors in Pakistan in the 26/11 case.
There has been no conviction from Pakistan’s side in the 26/11 matter, so far.
In 2019 and 2021, Pakistan arrested LeT chief Hafiz Saeed and Lakhvi, respectively, under pressure from the inter-governmental agency Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
Similarly, a key planner of the 26/11 attack, Sajid Mir, was arrested in April 2022 and sentenced by an anti-terrorism court in Lahore on terror-financing charges just a month later, and right before a plenary of the FATF.
The Pathankot varnish
In January 2016, a group of terrorists said to be of the JeM attacked the Pathankot airbase of the Indian Air Force. The attack left seven security personnel dead and more than 30 people injured. All four terrorists involved were killed in an operation led by the Indian Army.
Around mid-February, the Pakistan government filed an FIR related to the airbase attack at Gujranwala. It constituted a joint investigation team (JIT) to conduct a probe based on information shared by Indian investigating agencies.
The five-member team visited India between 27 March and 1 April, and was taken to the scene of crime in Pathankot.
The Ministry of Home Affairs in July 2016 informed Parliament that the Pakistani probe team was permitted to interact with India’s counterterrorism body National Investigation Agency (NIA) by the terms of reference mutually agreed upon based on reciprocity.
“The exercise was aimed at providing evidence to the JIT so that all those guilty of Pathankot attack could be prosecuted effectively in Pakistan. The NIA briefed the JIT on investigations carried out in the Pathankot airbase terror attack. The Pakistan JIT, in turn, shared with the NIA the results of investigations carried out by them in Pakistan,” the ministry stated.
The NIA had handed over crucial details such as DNA reports of terrorists killed in the operation at the airbase and requested the JIT to match them with DNA of family members of the terrorists.
The team had assured of full cooperation and promised to execute letters rogatory issued by Indian courts. However, the NIA was never allowed to go to Pakistan to investigate the case, and the agency has received no information from Pakistan on the status of the Pathankot probe.
In December 2016, the NIA filed a chargesheet against JeM chief Maulana Masood Azhar, his brother and Jaish deputy chief Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar, top commander Shahid Latif and primary handler of the Pathankot attackers Kashif Jan, a resident of Charsada in Pakistan.
The JeM was also said to be behind an attack on a security convoy in February 2019 that killed 40 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in Kashmir’s Pulwama.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)