Pakistan on Thursday said that it has nothing to do with the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack accused Tahawwur Rana, asserting that he is a Canadian national and has not renewed his Pakistani documents for over two decades.
Born in Pakistan in 1961, Rana served in the Pakistan Army Medical Corps, before migrating in the 1990s to Canada, where he was given citizenship. “He is a Canadian national and as per our record he has not renewed his Pakistani documents for over two decades,” Foreign Office spokesperson Shafqat Ali Khan said while responding to a question during his weekly press briefing here.
Though the spokesperson stopped short of providing details of “documents”, such documents often include a national identity card for overseas Pakistanis and a passport. Rana is known to be associated with Pakistani-American terrorist David Coleman Headley, one of the main conspirators of the 26/11 attacks. Headley conducted a recce of Mumbai before the attacks by posing as an employee of Rana’s immigration consultancy.
A total of 166 people, including six Americans, were killed in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks in which 10 Pakistani terrorists laid a more than 60-hour siege, attacking and killing people at iconic and vital locations in Mumbai.
Rana is accused of plotting the attack and has been extradited from the US, years after the horrendous attack at the Indian financial hub shook the country. In the same press conference, Khan condemned the changes in the Waqf laws by India, calling it an “infringement over the religious and economic rights of Indian Muslims”.
“The passage of this discriminatory legislation is also reflective of the growing majoritarianism in India. There are serious apprehensions that it will contribute to further marginalization of Indian Muslims,” he said while responding to a query. To a question about leftover weapons in Afghanistan, he said that the fact of the matter is that the “leftover weapons are being used in attacks against our security forces within Pakistani territory” and Pakistan has always emphasized it.
