An Indian judge accepted the confession of the lone surviving gunman from the shooting attacks in Mumbai, but said yesterday the trial would proceed anyway.
The young Pakistani gunman, Ajmal Kasab, unexpectedly confessed on Monday to taking part in the attack last November that paralyzed Mumbai and killed 166 people.
The court had delayed a decision on whether to accept his confession and guilty plea, with prosecutors arguing that his statement was incomplete and accusing Kasab of seeking clemency.
In response, Kasab said he was willing to be hanged for his actions.
“Whatever I have done, I have done in this world. It would be better to be punished in this world. It would be better than God’s punishment. That’s why I have pleaded guilty,” Kasab told the court on Wednesday.
Judge M.L. Tahiliyani decided yesterday to accept Kasab’s confession, but he ordered the trial to continue because the accused did not address all 86 charges against him.
“The trial will proceed,” he said.
Kasab’s confession linked the attack to a shadowy group in Pakistan. The statement bolstered India’s charges that terrorist groups across the border were behind the well-planned attack, and that Pakistan is not doing enough to clamp down on them.
After the judge made his ruling, defense lawyer Abbas Kazmi asked to be recused from the case saying that his client had no faith in him.
“If he has no confidence in me, there is no sense in me continuing in the case,” he said.
The judge urged Kazmi to remain on the case and told the lawyer and defendant to discuss their relationship during a recess.
Chief Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam had tried to get Kasab’s confession thrown out, saying it was neither complete nor accurate.
Kasab admitted spraying gunfire into the crowd at Mumbai’s main train station, and described in detail a network of training camps and safe houses across Pakistan, revealing the names of four men he said were his handlers. However, he denied killing four policemen.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
RSS