A powerful Islamist militant group denied on Monday links to a Pakistani man arrested in the United States on charges of providing support to the outfit blamed for the deadly Mumbai attacks in 2008. Jubair Ahmad, 24, stands accused of providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), designated by the US as a foreign terrorist organisation, and then lying about his involvement to investigators.
“The arrested Pakistani young man Jubair Ahmed has never been associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba,” the group’s spokesman Abdullah Ghaznavi told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been investigating Ahmad, a legal permanent resident living in the US state of Virginia, since 2009, after receiving information that he might be linked to LeT. The FBI learned that as a teen Ahmad received “indoctrination and training from LeT while he lived in Pakistan”, and that from the United States he communicated with the son of the extremist group’s founder Hafiz Saeed.