New Delhi: Feroze Shah Kotla stadium had begun to degenerate into an angry melée, showers of plastic bottles and Hindi abuse overflowing into the ground as it became clear India had no hope of successfully chasing 309 runs. The hundreds of Pakistani visitors who had been given visas as part of an unfolding peace effort — among them a slight young man with a neatly-trimmed beard, his hair parted down the middle — cheered for their team. Like the others, Sajid Mir was getting his money’s worth.
Then, on 26/11, intelligence operatives listening in to the carnage at the Chabad House heard his voice for the first time.
“Stand her up on this side of your door,” Mir told one of the Lashkar-e-Taiba death-squad members. “Shoot her such that the bullet goes right through her head and out the other side,” Do it, in Allah’s name.”
The name took global centre stage Tuesday, as Indian diplomats attacked China’s decision to block the global blacklisting of Mir — even though he was convicted secretly by a court in Pakistan in 2022, as part of its promises to escape international counter-terrorism sanctions.
Ministry of External Affairs joint secretary Prakash Gupta said China’s decision pointed to something “genuinely wrong with the global counter-terrorism architecture”.
French connection
Few fragments have become available on Sajid Mir’s life. According to the passport Mir used to travel to India, he was born in 1976 in an ethnic-Punjabi family of Partition refugees. Mir’s father Abdul Majid worked for a time in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Pakistan to set up a small textile business. Following a college education in Lahore, Indian intelligence officers familiar with the case told ThePrint, Mir married the daughter of a retired Pakistan army maulvi, and fathered at least two children.
Then, evidence began emerging that Mir had become a central figure in a plot to set fire to the world. The students at the Lashkar’s training camps came from around the world. Following 9/11, Willie Brigitte, a Guadeloupe-born former French naval cadet, arrived in Pakistan seeking to fight against the US alongside the Taliban. A convert to Islam, Brigitte had become involved in neo-fundamentalist networks at mosques in Paris’s Couronnes neighbourhood, linked to the Algerian jihadist group Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat — today known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
The jihadist ended up in a Lashkar training camp near Muzaffarabad, along with recruits from several other countries. ‘Bill,’ French judge Jean Louis Bruguiére wrote, had two bodyguards in constant attendance. To his students, it appeared “Sajid Mir was a high-ranking officer in the Pakistani Army and apparently also was in the ISI.”
In 2003, travelling on a ticket paid for by Mir, Brigitte reached Australia, with orders to surveil potential targets along with Pakistan-born architect Fahim Lodhi — among them, a nuclear reactor near Sydney. French intelligence, however, had been maintaining surveillance on Brigitte, and notified their counterparts in Sydney.
Lodhi is now serving out a life sentence in Australia. Brigitte received a nine-year sentence in France, was released, and then left for the Islamic State with his fourth wife and a child — where he is believed to have been killed in fighting.
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Lashkar worldwide 26/11
The jihad network the Lashkar nurtured grew similar branches across the world in the years after 9/11, intelligence services soon discovered. Eleven men were convicted in the US through 2004 and 2005 for running a jihad network in Virginia. Four of the men, it was revealed, had trained at the camp run by Mir. Omar Khayam and Dhiren Barot, responsible for bomb-plots in the UK, also trained with the Lashkar. In 2004, Lashkar jihadist Danish Ahmad, a Kashmir veteran, was held in Iraq.
Exactly how Mir ended up at the centre of these networks remains unclear. Indian intelligence has no record suggesting he served in Kashmir, where the Lashkar’s military operations were overwhelmingly focussed.
From the work of scholar C. Christine Fair, it is clear that the Lashkar shared the world-view of groups like al-Qaeda. Lashkar cadre fought in conflicts from Tajikistan and Chechnya to Bosnia. In December 1998, the Pakistani newspaper Jang reported that jihadists from more than 50 countries attended a convention organised by the Lashkar’s parent organisation, then called the Markaz Dawat Wal Irshad.
“You can go to any jihadi frontline in the world,” the organisation bragged, “and you will find Markaz Dawat Wal Irshad mujahideen crushing the infidels and destroying the fortresses of the devil.”
Lashkar-trained jihadists kept emerging in global counter-terrorism investigations: As late as 2012, one of three men alleged to be involved in a plot to attack Gibraltar during the London Olympics was found to have trained with the Lashkar.
Following 9/11, Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf evicted foreigners from the Lashkar’s training camps, and tamped down its operations in Kashmir. The organisation’s infrastructure, though, was untouched — and after brief periods of incarceration, its leadership was active again.
The most important of Mir’s recruits was the son of an urbane Pakistani diplomat, Syed Salim Gilani, and the Philadelphia socialite Serill Headley — one of the many foreigners who had arrived at Lashkar’s camps after 9/11. The story of just why David Headley ended up there remains opaque. There has long been credible evidence he was spying for the US Drug Enforcement Agency: From 2001 to 2008, interestingly, American authorities ignored at least six warnings of his involvement in terrorism.
In 2005, Indian and American investigators believe, the ISI provided funds for Headley to set up a cover-business in Mumbai and to mount surveillance on potential targets. The visit Mir made to New Delhi the same year suggests multiple, similar missions. In the course of nine visits to India, supervised by Mir, Headley gathered the imaging needed for the Lashkar to train the killing team that carried out 26/11.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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