New Delhi/New York: India on Wednesday hit out at China for blocking a move at the UN to designate Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba terrorist Sajid Mir as a “global terrorist”, saying it shows a lack of genuine political will to fight the scourge of terrorism.
News agency reports from the UN said China had blocked a proposal moved by the US and India to blacklist Mir under the 1267 Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council as a global terrorist and subject him to assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo. Mir is wanted for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks of November, 2008. China, an all-weather benefactor of Pakistan, has earlier blocked several attempts to India and the US to impose UN sanctions on Pakistan-based terrorists.
In a strongly-worded statement, a joint secretary at India’s UN mission, Prakash Gupta, said if efforts to ban terrorists fail due to “petty geopolitical interests”, then “we really do not have the genuine political will to sincerely fight this challenge of terrorism”. He was quoted as saying at the UN counter-terrorism meeting: “The first and most critical gap we feel addressing is avoiding double standards, and this self-defeating justification of good terrorists versus bad terrorists. A terror act is a terror act, plain and simple. Any justification of any kind being used should not be countenanced by anybody.”
“While the 9/11 terror bombings in this iconic city of New York changed the landscape of the global counter-terrorism architecture, the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks shook the collective conscience of the world’s largest democracy,” Mr Gupta said. He also played an audio clip of Mir in which he can be heard instructing the terrorists from Pakistan during the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks.
Ten heavily-armed Pakistani terrorists from across the border entered Mumbai through the sea route on November 26, 2008, and wreaked havoc for three days, with scores of people, including many foreigners, being killed. “Justice still continues to elude the victims of the Mumbai terror attack,” he said. “But when the proposal for listing him did not go through the Security Council sanctions regime, we had strong reasons to believe that something was genuinely wrong in the global sanctions regime, as manifested in the Security Council,” Mr Gupta said.
“If we cannot get established terrorists, who have been proscribed across global landscapes, listed under the Security Council architecture for petty geopolitical interests, then we really do not have the genuine political will needed to sincerely fight this challenge of terrorism,” he added.
Mir, said to be in his mid-40s, is one of India’s most wanted terrorists and has a bounty of $5 million placed on his head by the US for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. In June last year, he was apparently jailed for over 15 years in a terror-financing case by an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan.
