Delhi court seeks trial records of 26/11 attack case from Mumbai
A Delhi court has sought trial records of the 26/11 terror attack from a Mumbai court ahead of the expected extradition of alleged mastermind Tahawwur Hussain Rana.
In an order dated January 28, District Judge Vimal Kumar Yadav directed officials of a Mumbai court to provide the case records. The directive came in response to a plea by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) seeking the retrieval of documents related to the case.
The trial court records were earlier transferred to Mumbai due to multiple cases linked to the attacks being pursued in both Mumbai and Delhi.
A US court had previously ruled that Pakistani-origin Canadian businessman Rana could be extradited to India, where he is wanted in connection with the 2008 Mumbai attacks carried out by the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
Officials have stated that Rana became part of the conspiracy in 2005 as a member of both LeT and Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), maintaining close ties with Pakistan-based operatives.
US President Donald Trump, while announcing his administration’s approval of Rana’s extradition, described him as “one of the plotters and very evil people of the world”.
Currently, 64-year-old Rana, a close associate of Pakistani-American terrorist David Coleman Headley, is under supervised detention in Los Angeles after completing a 14-year prison sentence in 2023.
Once extradited, Rana will become the third person to be tried in India in connection with the case, following the trial and execution of Ajmal Kasab in 2012 and the conviction of Zabiuddin Ansari, alias Abu Jundal.
According to the NIA chargesheet, Rana entered into a criminal conspiracy to execute the Mumbai attacks around early 2005, along with co-conspirators based in Pakistan. The NIA probe revealed that Rana helped Headley obtain an Indian visa and set up the ‘Immigrant Law Centre’ in Mumbai as a front for the operation.
In 2011, Rana was chargesheeted under various sections of the IPC and Section 6(2) of the SAARC Convention on Suppression of Terrorism.
