Lahore: The Lahore High Court on Saturday set aside a trial court’s conviction and acquitted 6 senior leaders of Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed’s banned Jamat-ud-Dawah (JuD) in a terror-financing case. Saeed-led JuD is the front organisation for the proscribed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the terror outfit responsible for carrying out the 2008 Mumbai attack that killed 166 people, including 6 Americans. The anti-terrorism court Lahore in April this year had handed 9-year imprisonment each to JuD senior leaders Prof. Malik Zafar Iqbal, Yahya Mujahid (JuD spokesperson), Nasarullah, Samiullah and Umar Bahadur and 6 months’ jail term to Hafiz Abdul Rehman Makki after an FIR was registered by the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) of the Punjab Police.
The trial court had found these leaders guilty of terror financing. They had been collecting funds and unlawfully financing the proscribed organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). It had also ordered the confiscation of assets made from funds collected through terrorism financing. “On Saturday LHC’s division bench comprising Chief Justice Muhammad Ameer Bhatti and Justice Tariq Saleem Sheikh set aside the trial court’s decision in the CTD’s FIR 18 of 2020 against the 6 JuD leaders after the prosecution failed to prove the charge against the appellants beyond a reasonable doubt,” a court official stated.
The official said the division bench allowed the petition of the JuD leaders, observing “the statement of the ‘star prosecution witness’ is not reliable as there is no corroboratory evidence.” LeT founder Saeed has also been convicted in dozens of FIRs registered by the CTD on charges of terror financing. The CTD had registered as many as 41 FIRs against the leaders of the JuD in different cities. The trial courts have so far decided 37 of them.