All evidence against JuD chief shared with Pak: Officials

“Nothing about Saeed was hidden” from the Pakistani authorities, top security officials said here. But, they declined to reveal the nature of the evidence.

Home Ministry officials, however, said the “dossier of evidence” mostly included communications intercepts and, in some cases, details of transfer of funds.

Ironically, neither the National Investigation Agency (NIA), set up by the Union government in January this year especially to probe terrorism-related cases, nor the CBI, which had earlier probed some special cases, have almost no information on Saeed.

Even though the intelligence agencies, including the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) have begun to share lot of information on Kashmir with the NIA, very little actionable evidence is being made available. Part of the reason for this is the continuing practice in both the IB and the RAW to share intelligence on a “need to know basis”.

According to sources in the National Security Council (NSC), the IB is the repository of nearly all the “hard evidence” against the Pakistan-centric terrorists, especially involving the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad, which have been active in Jammu and Kashmir and other parts of the country. The IB also possesses evidence against Saeed, who headed the LeT, the terrorist organisation that the JuD funded before it was banned by the Pakistani authorities in 2002.

The most recent corpus of evidence against Saeed apparently came to light after the Mumbai terror strikes. These include intercepts of “chatter” between some of the 10 terrorists and Saeed as well as other top LeT leaders. Besides, the IB was able to cull out some information on the role Saeed played in planning the Mumbai strikes from the arrested Pakistani terrorist Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amir Kasab.

Saeed’s alleged complicity was also believed to have been strong in the December 2001 attack on the Parliament and the July 11, 2006 bomb attacks on Mumbai trains.

Analysts sceptical

Security analysts are sceptical what “legal weight” the evidence furnished by India against Saeed, who had been held in house arrest several times in the past, would hold in a Pakistani court.

While the Home Ministry sources said the evidence was “near fool-proof”, they added there was no way to corroborate the information without genuine efforts by the Pakistani law enforcement agencies.