Dozens of young students have gone missing from Beed in the last eight years. While intelligence agencies fear that the youth have been brainwashed into the doctrine of terror in the wake of the communal carnage in Gujarat, anxious family members spend sleepless nights worrying over the safety of their missing sons.
Who's the real Abu Jindal aka Zabiuddin Ansari? This is one of the most disturbing questions that the residents of Beed and Gevrai towns, in the dusty cotton bowl of Beed district in Maharashtra, are trying to come to terms with ever since news broke out that intelligence agencies have identified one of the handlers from Pakistan, who spoke to the 26/11 terrorists at the Chabad House, as Syed Zabiuddin Syed Zakiuddin aka Abu Jindal.
In the first ever carnage during the National Democratic Alliance regime led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, 16 people were gunned down by suspected Maoist cadres in a village in Bihar's Khagaria district late on Thursday night."Nearly 100 people, suspected to be Maoists, armed with automatic weapons, attacked the village Amosi Bharen Diara and fired indiscriminately late on Thursday night, killing 11 men and 5 children on the spot," said a police official.
Legal experts told rediff.com that there is no hard and fast rule that mercy petitions should be disposed off in order. The President can take a call and take up the matter out of turn. The President must be satisfied that there is an extraordinary circumstance concerning this case and hence it must be taken out of turn.
Judge M L Tahaliyani on Thursday awarded the death sentence to Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist arrested during the terror siege on the city in November 2008, for the carnage that had claimed 166 lives.
The usage of the phrase 'rarest of rare cases' has a very interesting history attached to it in India.
"It is kind of national shame that even after two decades, the matters are still pending. The Delhi High Court had already fixed a time frame of six months to wind up the trial," senior counsel R S Cheema, appearing for the CBI, submitted before Additional Sessions Judge Sunita Gupta.
Pakistan's Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik has confirmed the arrest of one more suspect in the Mumbai terror attacks and asked India to provide more information to proceed against those detained for perpetrating the carnage.
Claiming that the Mumbai carnage had "significant support from within India itself," President Asif Ali Zardari has said Pakistan needs cooperation from India to build the case for "effective prosecution" of the accused in courts in his country.
US terror suspect David Headley had conducted a detailed reccee of Nariman House before the Mumbai carnage and even entered the targeted Jewish Centre posing as a Jew, official sources said on Thursday. The new detail of Headley's movement in this western metropolis prior to the 26/11 attack came on the back of evidence that the US national had also visited and stayed at Taj and Oberoi here--the two luxury hotels which was attacked.
Sympathies for the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, the group involved in Mumbai carnage, and its jihadist and anti-India culture run deep in the Pakistani establishment, raising a serious challenge to any long-lasting move to dismantle the terror network.
In his new book Mumbai 26/11: A Day of Infamy, B Raman takes a typically incisive look at last November's terror carnage in Mumbai, which he believes was truly an attack by Pakistan on India, and suggests ways we can prevent a recurrence of such attacks.
Shoukatullah Ghouri, a suspect in the seven year old Aksharadham temple attack case, was taken to Gujarat by a police team after he was nabbed at the Hyderabad International Airport in a joint operation by the counter intelligence wing and the Hyderabad police.
India on Friday handed over to Pakistan the replies to the 30 questions, about the terror attack on Mumbai in November last year, posed by that country. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee handed over India' reply to Pakistan High Commissioner Sahid Malik. Earlier, Home Minister P Chidambaram had handed over the document along with evidence to Mukherjee. He had added that each and every question posed by Islamabad had been answered adequately.
The statement by Lt General Michael Maples, Director, Defence Intelligence Agency of the US Army, in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee comes a day after the State Department said Pakistan needs to do more in bringing the perpetrators of the Mumbai terrorist attack to justice.
This barefoot pilgrimage home we're seeing all around us, and the way plenty of us have reacted to it, is not just a commentary on India, circa 2020. It also shames us forever, notes Dilip D'Souza.
A Pakistani national has been detained in Dhaka in connection with the Mumbai terror attack. The Pakistani detainee was reportedly responsible for running the financial network of the LeT and preparing the groundwork for the actual attack. The Pakistani national held in Dhaka is also linked to the LeT.
"Bangladesh is at risk of more sabotage," on the pattern of last weeks bloody mutiny by the nations's paramilitary force, which left 73 people dead, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has warned. "The conspirators are not finished yet," she said while cautioning that her administration will have to remain alert.
B Raman's latest book 26/11: A Day of Infamy critically examines India's failure to learn from its worst terrorist attack.
Time-tested methods have no place in the game of intelligence -- the trick lies in ever inventing something new and something least expected, says Ajit Doval, former Intelligence Bureau Director.
The Gujarat High Court on Monday dismissed a petition challenging the Central Pota Review Committee's recommendation of dropping Prevention of Terrorism Act charges against the accused in Godhra train carnage case. With this decision, nearly 134 accused in the Godhra train burning case will not be tried under the repealed anti-terror law.
Bangladesh Home Minister Sahara Khatun slammed Pakistan investigation agency's claim that outfits from the country could be involved in the terror attack in the Indian financial capital last year.
Agitated over confusing signals emanating from Pakistan with regard to Mumbai attacks, India on Friday slammed it for not responding through proper channel and felt that Islamabad was doing it deliberately to hide the truth about involvement of state actors in the carnage.
"We are unhappy," said Home Minister P Chidambaram, reacting to Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Mohd Saeed's release by a court in Pakistan.
The Mumbai carnage could not have been carried out without indirect support from 'professional organisations' in Pakistan, Navy chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta said in Mumbai on Thursday."Of course there is indirect support.....some professional organisations could be involved," he said when asked if the terrorists had received assistance from Pakistani state agencies."How do you learn to do what you are doing? How do you get the infrastructure," he asked.
Backing India's evidence on Mumbai attacks as 'totally credible', France on Saturday asked Pakistan to extend full cooperation to ensure that those behind the carnage are punished in the 'most severe way'.At the same time, the influential European nation advocated that India and Pakistan should resume composite dialogue at an appropriate time as 'they have to live side by side'.
India will allow Pakistan to provide legal assistance to Ajmal Kasab, the only surviving Mumbai carnage terrorist arrested, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said on Saturday.
Pakistan on Tuesday executed nine convicts, including four brothers, in the latest hangings since it lifted a moratorium on death penalty last year following the Peshawar carnage.
Amid a chill in Indo-Pak ties, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi called up External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and discussed the situation arising out of Mumbai terror attacks.
Pakistan has not received any "solid evidence" against outlawed Jamaat-ud-Dawah chief Hafiz Mohammed Saeed from India so far, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said on Friday, as New Delhi presented a fresh dossier on the26/11 carnage to Islamabad.
Notwithstanding the dossiers of information handed over by India, Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence believes that there is nothing to implicate Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, a key accused in the Mumbai terror attack case, a media report said in Islamabad on Wednesday, quoting an ISI official.Jamaat-ud-Dawah chief Saeed, who was also the founder of terror outfit Lashkar-e-Tayiba, was let off in July by a Pakistani court.
The terror attacks in Mumbai revealed deficiencies in law enforcement, especially in the areas of crisis response and management, Ratan Tata, owner of the Taj hotel, which bore the brunt of the carnage, has said.
The US officials estimate that the widespread carnage could have been carried out for relatively small price tag of between $100,000 (almost 50 lakh) and $200,000 (almost 1 crore), which, they say, is the cost of machine guns, grenades, ammunition and boats used, said ABC News.
The information provided by India so far is "not sufficient," Interior Minister Rehman Malik was quoted as saying by the Express 24/7 news channel. He also said that India has not given some of the information sought by Pakistan last month.
The former armyman -- identified as Sajid Mir -- has turned out to be Headley's handler in Pakistan and was tasking the American to learn praying like Jews so that he could conduct a recce of Jewish Centre Nariman House in Mumbai and the premises of a newspaper in Denmark, official sources said in Mumbai on Wednesday.
A group of journalism students have jointly written a book on the 18 martyrs of the 26/11 attacks, titled '26/11, Eighteen', as a tribute to the sacrifice made by the 18 officers of different security agencies to save other lives during the 60-hour carnage.
For Karambir Kang, the general manager of Taj hotel in Mumbai, not much has changed over the year.
A year after the 26/11 carnage, girls at the YWCA hostel in Colaba are still hounded by the horrifying memories of three sleepless nights when terror unfolded barely a few meters away in their backyard at Leopold Cafe and the iconic Taj.
Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist caught alive in the Mumbai carnage, appeared before court for the first time through video conferencing from his prison and the trial in the terror attack is set to begin from March 23.
An Indian peace delegation, during its visit to Pakistan after the Mumbai terror strikes, has tried to impress upon the Zardari government to expedite prosecution of the perpetrators of the carnage saying the people in India are "angered" by the ghastly incident.
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