New York: After a federal appeals in the US Court dismissed his petition against extradition, Pakistani-Canadian Tahawwur Rana now faces the bleak possibility of being tried in India for the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, which claimed the lives of around 175 people.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California upheld a lower federal court’s decision to allow his extradition, holding that the 1997 extradition treaty between India and the US covered his alleged offences.
Rana currently has no other legal option than to file an appeal with the Supreme Court, where there is little probability that he will even get a hearing. According to the Justice Department, less than 1% of all appeals are heard by the Supreme Court.
Given that the US has refused to extradite Rana’s Pakistani-American collaborator, Daood Gilani, who goes by the name David Headley, extradition of Rana would be a partial success of India’s attempts to have the Lashkar-e-Taiba accomplices based in the US stand prosecution in India.
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Headley was an informant for the US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency. He agreed to collaborate with the US government in exchange for not being extradited after confessing to twelve crimes related to terrorism.
A three-panel bench of the appeals court heard the habeas corpus petition challenging the Central California District Court’s ruling permitting Rana’s extradition.
India “provided sufficient competent evidence” to support the initial decision of a magistrate judge’s “finding of probable cause that Rana committed the charged crimes” to warrant the extradition, according to Judge Milan Smith, who penned the opinion for the bench.
In 2009, Rana, a Canadian citizen residing in Chicago, was arrested for allegedly planning to bomb the Danish newspaper “Jyllands-Posten” after it published a contentious photo of the Prophet Mohammed.
In a Chicago federal court, he was charged with three major offences: supporting Lashkar, taking part in the Danish case, and planning the Mumbai attacks.
The Mumbai attack charge was dropped, but he was found guilty in the other two and given a 14-year term.
The appeals court decided that since he was facing many charges in India, his acquittal on the Mumbai attack charge did not impact his extradition.
The judgement stated that among the counts include forgery, terrorism, murder, conspiracy, and waging war.
During the Covid epidemic, Rana was released from prison after seven years on compassionate grounds. India then demanded his extradition to stand trial there, and the magistrate court granted their plea.
Rana, a former physician in the Pakistan Army, immigrated to Canada and opened an immigration agency.
According to the ruling, Rana assisted Headley in obtaining a five-year visa for India under the guise of opening a branch of his company in India.
Headley used the visa to help plot the Lashkar terror rampage by surveilling the Taj Hotel and other targets. Headley had informed Rana about the surveillance activities, the judgement said.
Judge Smith also noted in the judgement that “Rana commended the terrorists who carried out the attacks and stated that the people of India ‘deserved it’.”
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Arul Louis –IANS
