More than five years after the 26/11 terror attacks, Hafiz Seed, the mastermind of the Mumbai carnage, continues to roam free, spewing anti-India rhetoric and what New Delhi calls “malevolent and medieval ideas.”
Surprisingly, and most disconcertingly, Saeed, the founder of Jaish-e-Muhammad (JuD), a front for anti-India terror group Laskar-e-Taiba, who has been slapped with international sanctions, continues to find new outlets for his virulent propaganda.
In a recent interview to the BBC, Hafiz Saeed repeated that he had nothing to do with the 26/11 carnage. Stressing that Pakistan’s courts had declared India’s evidence against him as having no legal standing, he argued that India’s accusations against him were part of a propaganda offesnive. The Mumbai attack, unleashed by 10 Pakistani terrorists, left 166 people dead over five years ago.
Recently, the US declared Jamaat-ud Dawa, an organisation Saeed heads, as a “foreign terrorist organisation” – a move that freezes any assets it has under US jurisdiction. It has also placed a $10 million bounty on him.
Reacting to this move Saeed claimed in the interview that “America always takes decisions based on Indian dictation. Now it’s imposing this new ban because it needs India’s help in Afghanistan”.
India has reacted sharply to Hafiz Saeed’s latest bout of propaganda and rubbished his comments as “malevolent and medieval.”
“It is not for us to question why a specific broadcasting agency or a media house wants to carry an interview of a UN-designated terrorist group head and a UN-designated terrorist organisation,” Syed Akbaruddin, the spokesperson of India’s foreign office, said in Delhi July 1 in response to a question. “However, we find it incongruous that both within and outside Pakistan Hafiz Saeed receives great latitude in peddling his malevolent and medieval ideas.”
In official talks with Pakistan, India has repeatedly asked Islamabad to bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai mayhem to justice, including Hafiz Saeed.
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