Punish 26/11 plotters : India to Pakistan

India’s External Affairs Minister SM Krishna has told Pakistan categorically that the perpetrators, who killed 166 people in Mumbai on this day two years ago, must be punished.

“On the second anniversary of the barbaric terrorist attack in Mumbai, the nation pays respectful homage to its sons and daughters and foreign guests, whose innocent lives were cruelly snuffed out. The day is a stark reminder that no cause can ever justify terror, either by state or non-sate actors,” Krishna said in a diplomatic note on Friday.

He said “substantive and verifiable” progress has not been made in the probe into Mumbai terror attacks cases in Pakistan.

“Once again I call upon Pakistan, to dismantle the terror machine operating with impunity in territories under its control and to bring all the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attack to speedy justice,” Krishna said.

Stating that India was committed to resolving all outstanding issues through diaologues, and was in favour of ‘peaceful, stable and cooperative relations’ with Pakistan, the External Affairs Minister said he had travelled to Islamabad last July for talks and also invited his counterpart Mahmodd Qureshi to visit New Delhi for further discussions.

Paying homage to the 26/11 victims, Parliament observed silence as the nation remembered the day with respect to those got killed in the deadly terror attacks.

Meanwhile, Times of India quoted a well placed source as saying on Friday that Pakistani gunman Ajmal Kasab’s nine associates were buried near the high-security Taloja prison in January, last year after the state government waited for 14 months for Pakistan to claim the bodies.

The officials, however, were tight-lipped on the details of the quiet burial of the nine terrorists’ bodies.

“The bodies were brought in police vans near the jail. An excavator, operated by two persons, had dug up the soil. The bodies, one by one, were dumped there. The excavator’s operators then filled up the spot with soil,” the report said.

Many Muslim organizations in Mumbai had objected to their burial in their cemetery, as they were “killers”. The state then decided to bury them quietly.

Early last year, the Muslim Council had refused to allow the burial in the Marine Lines Bada Qabrastan. The council had sent a message to cemeteries across the nation that none of the terrorists should be buried on Indian soil.

The influential Muslim Jama Masjid Trust, which runs the 7.5-acre Qabrastan in south Mumbai, had said it would not permit the burial as the gunmen were not true followers of Islam.

Maharashtra Home Minister R.R. Patil had on April 6 said that the bodies of the terrorists, killed by special forces during a three-day siege of the city in Nov 2008, were buried and adequate care was taken to ensure that the matter was kept a secret.