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Kasab’s plea for mercy rejected

The mercy petition to the president, made by Kasab after the Supreme Court upheld his death sentence, has been rejected and the recommendation in this regard forwarded to the president, a home ministry spokesman said.

Kasab was one of 10 Pakistanis who sailed into India from Pakistan and landed at Mumbai to launch the Nov 26-29 mayhem, which left dead 166 people, including many foreigners.

Last month, the Maharashtra home department recommended to President Mukherjee to reject Kasab’s mercy plea.

Meanwhile, a judicial commission from Pakistan probing the Mumbai terror attacks may not be permitted to visit India, unless an investigation team from India gets to visit the neighbouring country first to examine the need for a trip by the Pakistani panel.

Home ministry officials here said that they want to send a National Investigation Agency (NIA) team, which is probing the 26/11 strike, to Pakistan to examine material evidence against key masterminds and accused in the 2008 attacks that claimed over 160 lives, including that of foreign nationals.

Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi and his six other accomplices are facing trial in Pakistan in a Rawalpindi court in connection with the Mumbai attacks.

India’s Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde had raised the issue of the NIA team’s visit during his meeting with his counterpart Rehman Malik on the sidelines of the South Asian Association for Region Cooperation (SAARC) ministerial meeting in the Maldives in September. “Unless the NIA team is allowed to visit Pakistan and understand the necessity of the second visit of the Pakistani judicial commission to India, it is difficult for us to say anything now,” an official said when queried if the panel’s visit was possible anytime soon.

An eight-member Pakistani judicial commission had visited India in March this year following a bilateral agreement.

The panel, which included prosecutors and defence lawyers, visited Mumbai and interviewed a judge who recorded the statement of Kasab during the Mumbai attacks trial, a senior police official and two doctors who conducted the autopsies on the terrorists’ bodies involved in the attacks and their victims.