Mumbai attacks gunman convicted
Accused faces death sentence
A Pakistani man who was the lone surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks was convicted yesterday of murder and waging war against India for his role in the 60-hour siege that left 166 people dead.
Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, 22, was found guilty on almost all of the 86 charges he faced over the 10-man assault on three luxury hotels, a restaurant, a Jewish centre and the main Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) station.
"You have been found guilty of waging war against India and killing people at CST, killing government officials and abetting the other nine terrorists," Judge M.L. Tahaliyani told Mr Kasab in Hindi.
The judge said Mr Kasab had been trained in Pakistan to fight a "war" against India and had been directly or jointly responsible for the deaths of 52 people in the train station - the bloodiest episodes of the onslaught.
Dressed in a long white shirt in the traditional style of his native state of Punjab, the defendant stood impassively in the dock in the special prison court as the judge went through a summary of the 1,522-page verdict in English.
A hearing to decide on sentence is set for today. Mr Kasab faces the death sentence for the murder and waging war convictions.
Indian nationals Fahim Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed, accused of providing logistical support to the gunmen by supplying them with handwritten maps of the city, were found not guilty in a major rebuff to the prosecution.
The widely-expected judgment on Mr Kasab came after the prosecution presented evidence including DNA and fingerprints, security camera footage and photographs, plus testimony from hundreds of witnesses.
Mr Kasab, a school dropout, was captured in a photograph walking through Mumbai's train station wearing a backpack and carrying an AK-47 in what has become one of the defining images of the attacks.
The former labourer initially denied the charges, then pleaded guilty, before reverting to his original stance and claiming that he was set up by the police and had been in Mumbai only to watch films.
Observers expect the judge to pass a death sentence but a lengthy, possibly open-ended, appeal through the Indian courts is likely.
The government officially supports capital punishment for what the Supreme Court in New Delhi has called the "rarest of rare" cases but no execution has been carried out since 2004 and only two since 1998.