Detention of Mumbai attacks suspect extended by a month

It is fourth time Lakhvi’s detention under section 3 of Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) has been extended

LAHORE: A day after the Islamabad High Court (IHC) ordered his release, the alleged mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai terror siege, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, was detained afresh for one month by the Punjab government.

The administration of Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail, where Lakhvi is incarcerated, has received the fresh detention orders from the provincial home department. It is the fourth time Lakhvi’s detention under the Section 3 of the Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) has been extended.

“The new detention order was issued late Friday,” Lakhvi’s lawyer Rizwan Abbasi told AFP. He claimed that the new order was ‘illegal, unconstitutional and contemptuous,’ arguing that detention orders could not be issued repeatedly. “We will challenge it in the high court.”

Lakhvi was granted bail by an anti-terror court in December, but quickly slapped with a detention order under the MPO. The IHC suspended that order, only for the Supreme Court to reinstate it in January. On Friday Justice Noorul Haq Qureshi of the IHC once again set aside the detention order, only for a new one to be issued hours later.

Throughout the three-month back and forth over Lakhvi’s detention, he has never been let out of Adiala Jail.

Friday’s ruling of the IHC triggered a blistering knee-jerk reaction from India which called Pakistan’s high commissioner in New Delhi to the external affairs ministry to convey ‘outrage’ to Pakistan.

Releasing Lakhvi would violate “Pakistan’s professed commitment to combat terrorism, including its recently stated policy of not differentiating amongst terrorists”, the ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin said, adding that his government had ‘conveyed its outrage’ to Pakistan.

In a tit-for-tat move, Pakistan summoned India’s senior diplomat to the Foreign Office and lodged a protest over India’s ‘unnecessary hype’ on the IHC ruling. It also pressed upon New Delhi to share with Islamabad details of the 2007 Samjhauta train bombing in which several Pakistanis were killed.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 15^th, 2015.