India has officially requested Pakistan to extradite Hafiz Saeed for his trial in India in 2008 Mumbai attacks’ case, the foreign media reported on Saturday.
Spokesperson for the Indian Foreign Ministry Arindam Bagchi confirmed this to the media in a weekly briefing on Friday.
“We have conveyed a formal request, accompanied by pertinent supporting documents, to the government of Pakistan,” he noted.
Previously, when questioned about the extradition request during her weekly press briefing on Thursday, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, Spokesperson for Pakistan’s Foreign Office, refrained from commenting on what she referred to as “speculative reporting.”
According to the foreign media, Hafiz Saeed, a cleric accused by India in connection to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has been a prominent yet elusive figure in Pakistan since the early 2000s.
Over the years, his public visibility has diminished, with intermittent periods of attention due to government crackdowns on his organization, Lashkar-i-Taiba (LeT), and its associated charity arm, Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), in response to growing international pressure.
According to the BBC, Saeed founded LeT in the 1990s, and when it faced a ban, the resurgence of Jamaat-ud-Dawa wal-Irshad, an older organization, occurred in 2002 under the new name Jamaat-ud-Dawa.
In 2017, the Pakistani government initiated a crackdown on JuD, leading to Saeed’s house arrest. However, he was released in November 2017 when the Lahore High Court declined to extend his confinement period.
Pakistan, in 2018, aligned itself with the United Nations’ list of banned terrorist organizations by extending the ban on JuD within its borders.
Prior to this, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan had prohibited JuD and several other organizations, named in the UN Security Council’s list of banned outfits, from collecting donations in the country, said the reports by the foreign media.
