Roving Periscope: China ‘protects’ 26/11 Mumbai terror attack planner Sajid Mir at the UN–again!

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: The global terror cooperation between the dictatorships of China, the protector, and Pakistan, the perpetrator, continues apace as they attempt to hoodwink the world believing no one is seeing.

Its zero credibility notwithstanding, China has once again protected a Pakistan-based top terror mastermind, Sajid Mir, at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) where the US and India tried to designate the dreaded Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) member as a global terrorist.

On Thursday, China ‘put a hold’ on a proposal moved at the UNSC by the US and co-supported by India to declare Sajid Mir, one of India’s most wanted terrorists and the main handler of the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks, as a global terrorist.

The media reported Beijing blocked the proposal to blacklist Mir under the 1267 Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UNSC as a global terrorist and subject him to assets freeze, travel ban, and arms embargo.

Mir carries a bounty of USD 5 million placed on his head by the US for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks in which American citizens also died.

In June this year, he was jailed for over 15 years in a terror-financing case by an ‘anti-terrorism’ kangaroo court in Pakistan, which is struggling to exit the grey list of the international terror financing watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

Pakistani had in the past claimed Mir had died, but the unconvinced West demanded proof. This issue became a major sticking point in FATF’s assessment of Islamabad’s progress on the action plan late last year.

Early this week also, ahead of the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO) Summit in Samarkand (Uzbekistan), Islamabad tried to take the world for a ride when it asked Kabul to ‘trace and handover’ Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar. It was a crude attempt to fool the world, which saw through it as the Pakistan Army-controlled Shehbaz Sharif government’s begging attempt for aid as a terror-and-flood victim. The Taliban, however, quickly retorted: “They can only find such terrorists in Pakistan, not Afghanistan!”

Mir is a ‘terror-asset’ of the Pakistan-based LeT whom India wants for his proven involvement in the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai in which over 150 people, including foreigners, were killed and hundreds of others injured. He was LeT’s chief operations manager for the attacks, playing a leading role in their planning, preparation, and execution, the US State Department said.

Last month also, China put a hold on a proposal by the US and India at the UN to blacklist Abdul Rauf Azhar, the brother of Masood Azhar, sanctioned by the US in December 2010.

Beijing, an ‘all-weather’ friend of Islamabad, has repeatedly thrown spanners in the UN’s attempts to blacklist Pakistan-based terrorists under the UNSC’s Sanctions Committee. In June this year, China put a hold, at the last moment, on a joint proposal by India and the US, to list Pakistan-based terrorist Abdul Rehman Makki under the 1267 Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee of the UNSC.

Makki is a US-designated terrorist and brother-in-law of LeT co-founder and 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. New Delhi and Washington had jointly proposed to designate Makki as a global terrorist under the 1267 ISIL and Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council, but Beijing blocked it at the last minute.

Since 2001, the State Department has been saying that Mir was a senior member of LeT. From 2006 to 2011, he was in charge of LeT’s external operations and planned and directed various terrorist attacks. He also conspired to attack a terrorist attack against a newspaper and its employees in Denmark between 2008 and 2009.

For his key role in the Mumbai attacks, Mir was indicted in the United States in April 2011. In August 2012, the US Department of the Treasury designated Mir as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. Because of this tag, all property and interests in the property of Mir that are subject to US jurisdiction are blocked, and they prohibit US people from engaging in any transactions with him.

Mir is on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List. He is believed to reside in Pakistan, according to information on the State Department website.

The US Congress says Pakistan is home to at least 12 global terrorist outfits.