Donald Trump approves extradition of 26/11 Mumbai terror attack accused Tahawwur Rana to India

Rana, a Canadian national of Pakistani origin, is currently lodged at a metropolitan detention centre in Los Angeles. He is known to be associated with Pakistani-American terrorist David Coleman Headley, one of the main conspirators of the 26/11 attacks.

New Delhi: Tahawwur Hussain Rana is set to be brought to justice for his alleged role in planning the November 26-28, 2008, terrorist attacks in Mumbai as President Donald Trump has approved the Pakistani Canadian businessman’s extradition from the United States to India.

“Today, I am pleased to announce that my administration has approved the extradition of one of the plotters and very evil people of the world, and having to do with the horrific Mumbai terrorist attack, to face justice in India. So, he is going back to India to face justice,” Trump said after a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House early on Friday.

Trump and Modi also called on Pakistan to expeditiously bring to justice the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai, and January 2016 Pathankot attacks and ensure that its territory is not used to carry out cross-border terrorist attacks. The leaders also pledged to work together to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems and to deny terrorists and non-state actors access to such weapons.

Rana exhausted his legal options to resist his extradition as the US Supreme Court on January 21 denied a writ of certiorari filed by him challenging the order of the lower courts to send him to India.

A team of the National Investigation Agency is likely to bring him back from the US to India soon.

Rana ran an immigration service providing business in Chicago. He was accused of allowing his childhood friend and the key 26/11 plotter David Coleman Headley to open an office of his company in Mumbai in 2006 and to use the cover for scouting targets in the city for the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba’s terrorist attacks two years later.

Altogether 166 people, including six citizens of the US, had been killed in the three-day-carnage carried out by a gang of 10 Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) terrorists, who had sailed from Karachi in Pakistan to the financial capital of India.

A few weeks before the attacks in Mumbai, Rana and Headley had been arrested in Chicago for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack in Denmark. The role of the duo in the 26/11 carnage in the financial capital of India had come to light during the subsequent investigation.

Headley had been sentenced to a 35-year jail term in the US for his role in the terrorist attack in India. Rana had been convicted of providing support to Headley and the LeT and for his role in plotting an attack against a newspaper in Denmark. The US court, however, had not convicted him of direct involvement in the attacks in Mumbai. He had been sentenced to 14 years in prison in the US in 2013. The NIA of India however continued to pursue the case against him for his alleged role in hatching the conspiracy for the 26/11 carnage.

Rana had been released from jail in the US on compassionate grounds after he had tested positive for Covid-19 in early 2020. He had been detained by the US authorities again after the NIA in June 2020 had requested for his extradition to India.

The US District Court of the Central District of California approved the extradition of Rana in May 2023. In August 2024, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the denial by the District Court in the Central District of California of his habeas corpus petition challenging the magistrate judge’s certification of him as extraditable to India.

Rana then on November 13 filed a "petition for a writ of certiorari" before the US Supreme Court to block his extradition to India. But his plea was denied by the apex court of the US on January 21.