United States officials were worried about the possibility that the top three Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants arrested by Pakistan in connection with the 26/11 Mumbai attacks could be acquitted and let free by the court for want of evidence, reported The Hindu while quoting a cable revealed by WikiLeaks.
They complained that New Delhi was at fault in this, as despite repeated interventions by the US government at several levels, it had not shared ‘certified evidence’ with Pakistan. On May 12, 2009, the day Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) in Rawalpindi granted more time to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to file the final chargesheet against the five LeT suspects, the US Embassy in Islamabad sent a cable to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington, which commended the FIA for diligent investigation into the attacks and observed that it had competently built up a case against the accused.
However, it noted, while the case against two of the lower-level LeT operatives, Hammad Ammen Sadiq and Shahid Jamil Riaz, was strong, the FIA did not have ‘enough independent evidence’ to successfully prosecute the senior leaders – Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Mazhar Iqbal alias al Qama, and Abdul Wajid alias Zarrar Shah.
The cable said important evidence that linked Lakhvi, Shah, and al Qama to the Mumbai attacks had to come from India which was also important for proving the connection between the attacks and a LeT conspiracy in Pakistan. Despite India’s claims that had passed on all relevant evidence to Pakistan, the cable remarked that none of the evidence that was passed on was judicially certified.
The newspaper said the US officials tried to impress upon India the need to share the most important items of proof that the FIA and the FBI needed. On May 6, 2009, Peter Burleigh, Charge d’ Affaires at the US Embassy in Delhi, met Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and raised the issue of evidentiary cooperation with Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the FIA in August 2009 arrested Jamil Ahmed, the sixth suspect in the Mumbai attacks, from his home in Battgram on a tip off from Saudi Arabia. A US diplomatic cable, sent two days after Ahmed’s arrest, noted that the FIA was still waiting for a few items of evidence from India. However, as the cable mentioned, the FIA had no expectation that India would release the evidence in time for the trial and made its own plans to strengthen the evidence.
The Hindu said it decided to have one of its investigators testify on the voice recordings against al Qama and Lakhvi. The US did its bit by helping the FIA screen the fingerprint images to gain better visibility.