‘Baby-faced killer’ confounds the court

Anuj Chopra, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: July 25. 2009 11:15PM UAE / July 25. 2009 7:15PM GMT

MUMBAI // His confession last week was almost theatrical.

Just as the prosecution’s 135th witness stepped into the box, Ajmal Kasab, dubbed “the baby-faced killer”, dramatically stood up to utter the unexpected: “Sir, I want to confess to my crime. I request you to accept my plea and pronounce the sentence.”

His admission surprised everyone in the courtroom, including his own lawyer.

Behind Mr Kasab’s seemingly impulsive confession, some observers see a repentant terrorist haunted by his own crime. But the prosecution and many victims of last year’s Mumbai attacks view this as merely a ploy by a terrorist trying to escape the hangman’s noose.

“Kasab fascinates me,” Bachi Karkaria, a columnist wrote last week in the Times of India. “Who is he? Dangerous fanatic or exploited innocent? Chillingly sane or a psychopathic schemer?”

While his dramatic confession fuelled speculation that Mr Kasab’s high-security trial, expected to be lengthy, will finish soon, the special judge ML Tahilyani ruled that his trial will continue. Mr Kasab, Mr Tahilyani reasoned, had only confessed to the basic offence, but not pleaded guilty to all 86 charges levied on him.

Since his trial began in May, Mr Kasab has not co-operated with the prosecution, has been unruly and overly talkative on some occasions, and cold and indifferent on many others. When some witnesses narrated heart-rending tales of loss while testifying against him, he burst into giggles.

But as weeks passed, he became quieter. There were signs that the trial was taking a psychological toll. Mr Kasab has been incarcerated in solitary confinement for months. He also recently learnt, reportedly through his prison guards, that Pakistan had pronounced him guilty in a dossier it shared with the Indian government this month. Moreover, there are indications of a heaviness of guilt welling up inside him after going through 134 witnesses.

“I do not want punishment from God,” Mr Kasab said after confessing in court last week. “Whatever I have done in this world I should get punished for it by this world itself.”

Two teams of doctors from Mumbai’s JJ Hospital, who routinely examine his physical condition, say Mr Kasab confided he was haunted by “faces of men, women and children he and his partner had killed.

“I cannot sleep a wink days on end,” he reportedly told a doctor who was interviewed last week by Mumbai Mirror, a daily tabloid.

A day after his confession, Mr Kasab unleashed yet another dramatic statement in court: “Hang me if you think I pleaded guilty to escape death.”

After months of being recalcitrant, he voluntarily gave several details of his role in the attack, his first gesture of co-operation with investigators. He was recruited as a village boy and trained in Pakistan to be a fedayeen fighter, a suicide attacker. He recounted how 10 gunmen, including him, each with a bag containing an AK-47 rifle, a pistol, eight hand grenades and three sets of two magazines each, journeyed from Karachi to Mumbai on four different boats on the first night of the attack. He also reportedly named some Lashkar-i-Taiba operatives who masterminded the attack.

“From being a tightly programmed pawn of his handlers, Kasab has become an out-of-control AK-47,” Karkaria wrote in her Times of India column. “He will use it on them with the recklessness of the man with nothing left to lose.”

But the prosecution is not impressed.

“Kasab is very shrewd, very clever to say that he be given the death penalty,” said Ujjwal Nikam, the chief prosecutor told reporters. “He knows that by [saying that], no Indian court is going to award the death penalty.”

Mr Nikam also said there are several contradictions in Mr Kasab’s confession.
Indian investigators say Mr Kasab was trained by Pakistan marines, an elite unit of the Pakistan navy, after being extensively trained by the Lashkar-i-Taiba at its various camps, according to an investigator from the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s intelligence agency.

He underwent crash courses in surveillance, reading topographical maps, sniping positions, urban warfare and kidnapping, the investigator said, requesting anonymity.
“He is so well trained that he cannot wilt under pressure so easily,” he said. “His confession is a farce.”

But KBN Lam, an advocate from the Mumbai High Court, suspects Mr Kasab is being subjected to torture in prison, compelling him to make that dramatic confession.

“There is as yet to the best of my knowledge, no report of any visit to Mr Kasab by independent prison-welfare officers,” Mr Lam said in an interview. “Until this takes place, we shall remain in the dark as regards the conditions he experiences in custody.”

Mr Lam is the defence lawyer for Sabauddin Ahmed, an Indian national who is being tried along with Mr Kasab for his alleged role in last year’s attacks.

In May, when the trial began, Mr Sabauddin told Mr Lam during a break in the trial proceedings that he was receiving “electric-shocks in custody to divulge information”.
It is possible that Mr Kasab is being subjected to similar treatment, Mr Lam said.

But even if that were true, in the eyes of many ordinary citizens of Mumbai, Mr Kasab remains a mass murderer, whose offence does not warrant any leniency.

Adhikrao Kale, 39, a police constable, was shot by Mr Kasab while on duty at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus on the first night of the attack. His intestine was nearly ruptured by the bullet that ricocheted off his stomach and got lodged in the upper abdomen.

Eight months later, Mr Kale cannot sit up straight for more than half an hour. He has little sympathy for the accused.

“He ought to be hanged,” Mr Kale said.

achopra@thenational.ae