Mohammed Kasab..

MOHAMMED KASAB: LAST SURVIVING MUMBAI GUNMAN EXECUTED IN INDIA

The execution of Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the sole survivor of ten terrorist ‘commandos’ who slaughtered 166 in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was welcomed by the families of those he killed and by Indian government ministers who called for Pakistan to follow its lead by bringing the plot’s masterminds to justice. Kasab, 25, was hung at 07.30 this morning in Yerwada Jail, in Pune, Maharashtra after India’s president Pranab Mukherjee, India’s foreign minister at the time of the attacks, rejected his final plea for clemency earlier this month. The execution was codenamed ‘Operation X’ and carried out in secrecy to prevent protests stalling the execution.

He was given the death sentence for his role in the attacks after his conviction in May 2010 for 86 charges of murder, terrorism, and ‘waging war against India.’ The trial judge M.L Tahaliyani described him as a ‘killing machine’ for his role in the bloodiest assault of the three day massacre when he and his accomplice shot dead 52 commuters and railway staff at Mumbai’s main station, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and another 20 people as they tried to flee the carnage.

Kasab, then 21, achieved instant notoriety when film pictures showed him calmly walking through station, smartly dressed with an AK47 machine gun casually hung over his shoulder, as he carried out the massacre.

The attack, the most bloody and dramatic in the history of modern India, brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war. Prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh accused sections of Pakistan’s security establishment of assisting the terrorists and said a plot of such scale could not have been carried out without military planning. The attack was blamed on the Lashkar e Taiba terrorist group, which is believed to have had support from Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service since it was established to fight Indian forces in Kashmir.

His execution comes at a delicate moment in India-Pakistan relations amid fresh efforts to improve trade and people-to-people ties between the two countries. While India has sought to improve the relationship it remains deeply frustrated at the slow pace of efforts to bring to justice the masterminds behind the attacks. Telephone intercepts revealed Pakistan-based 'controllers' directed the attacks with orders over internet-based mobile telephones as they watched their ‘operation’ on Indian live television news shows.