LAHORE: The Mumbai attacker Ajmal Amir Kasab’s Faridkot village in the Depalpur district of the Pakistani Punjab has apparently been taken over by the intelligence agencies in a bid to dissuade local as well as foreign journalists from filing anymore reports that could further establish Kasab’s identity as a Pakistani national.
Ajmal Kasab, the dark haired 21-year-old man arrested by Indian authorities in the first hours of the Mumbai assault — in which over 170 people died — left the village four years ago. Indian media reports say he would return once a year to see small family home and one villager recalled him talking about freeing the Muslim-dominated region of Kashmir from India. His origins are believed to be a key to the investigation of the attack and could have a profound impact on relations between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, already at the brink of confrontation. Until now, the Pakistan government has repeatedly said that there was no solid evidence to back Indian accusations that the gunmen came from Pakistan.
However, since the Mumbai terrorist attacks last month, hundreds of foreign and Pakistani journalists, both from the print ass well as the electronic media, have visited the hometown of the lone surviving attacker and filed stories which have almost proved the Indian government’s claims that Ajmal Kasab was in fact a Pakistani national and a member of the Lashkar-e-Toiba. However, British newspaper The Observer was the first to break the news after an independent investigation that Kasab was a Pakistani citizen. The Observer actually obtained electoral lists for Faridkot showing 478 registered voters, including Amir Ajmal, shown as the husband of Noor Elahi. At the address mentioned in the list, a man identifying himself as Sultan said he was the father-in-law of Mohammed Amir, the father of Ajmal Kasab.
The Observer report was more than enough to mobilise other foreign as well as local journalists in Pakistan who had been trying to locate this village in Punjab since the Indian government had claimed Kasab belonged to the Faridkot village. The media teams subsequently started storming the village, followed by two more ‘damaging’ storied reported by English daily Dawn and the Geo television that further established the Indian claims about Kasab’s Pakistani nationality. However, taking notice of all these developments and the increasing activities of the media people in Faridkot, the Pakistani authorities have dispatched dozens of intelligence people as well as heavy police contingents to cordon off the main entrance to the village, in a bid to stop any further media intrusion. While using the influence of the village elders, the agencies have ensured that if at all a media team is able to reach Faridkot, none of the 450-plus residents of the village would be allowed to speak to its members.
Similarly, the family members of Ajmal Kasab, including his father, mother and brothers and sisters have already been moved out of their Faridkot residence and shifted to another nearby village so that the media people could not approach them. As soon as a media team enters the village, the agencies’ personnel posing to be the residents of the area would start shouting at the newsmen to leave the place and not to take camera shots. Some of them even hold lathis in their hands. In a latest development, a foreign television channel team was attacked by the ‘villagers’ with punches and kicks. Their mobile phones and DVs were snatched by the crowd who also tried to smash their cameras. A recent report in Chicago Tribune, therefore, read: “Some people from the agencies are among the villagers who are organising the whole drama in Faridkot village which seems to be under some kind of shadowy siege”.
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