Judgment day for Ajmal Kasab

Two hundred and seventy-one working days, 654 witnesses, 3,192 pages of evidence and several dramatic twists and turns later, judgment day is finally upon Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab and two of his cohorts, Faheem Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed.

On November 26, 2008, Kasab and nine other trigger-happy terror recruits from Pakistan had unleashed a dance of death in Mumbai, killing 166 people and leaving the country numbed by their sheer audacity.

As first additional principal judge Madan Tahaliyani announces his verdict on Monday, the whole country — and many parts of the world — will be tuned in. The scale of the crime apart, the case, as it played out in the court, has been unique in several ways.

The 26/11 trial has been the fastest for a terror attack. Considering the mammoth task before the court — hundreds of witnesses, and thousands of pages of documents, evidence and articles — the movement of the case has been swift. The trial began on May 8, 2009, and less than a year on, the verdict is set to be out. It had taken 15 years in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case.

In another first in Indian legal history, US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials deposed in the case. They provided technical evidence that the killers came from Pakistan using the Global Positioning System and that they made calls from their mobile phones through voice over internet protocol (VOIP) to stay in touch with their handlers across the border.

Kasab, a native of Faridkot in Pakistan and a Lashkar-e-Taiba recruit, made several calculated flip-flops to throw the prosecution’s case off-track.

The man, identified by 30 witnesses in the court, resorted to several legal subterfuges to wriggle out. He started out with pleading not guilty before proceeding to call himself a juvenile, then pleading guilty, and then claiming innocence again.

As many as 1,611 questions were put to him during the trial.

Kasab has been charged with waging war against the country, being part of a conspiracy in executing the terror attacks, and murder. He faces a death sentence if convicted.

The other two accused — Ansari and Shaikh — are accused of preparing maps of Mumbai and handing them over to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) conspirators. These maps were allegedly used by the 10 gunmen.

The prosecution has declared 35 accused as wanted in the case, including LeT chief Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi. The court has issued non-bailable warrants against only 22 of the 35 accused as the prosecution failed to get the addresses or the complete names of some of them.