Mumbai Gunman Enters Plea Of Guilty

By Rama Lakshmi
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 21, 2009

NEW DELHI, July 20 -- The lone surviving gunman in last year's Mumbai attacks stunned a courtroom audience Monday by confessing his involvement in the deadly carnage that killed more than 170 people.

Ajmal Amir Kasab, one of the 10 gunmen who laid siege to India's financial capital for three days last November, stood as he narrated chilling details of his training in Pakistan, named the individuals who conceived the plan and outlined the journey the gunmen undertook by sea.

Upon reaching Mumbai, the gunmen attacked several sites, including two five-star hotels, a train station and a Jewish outreach center.

Kasab, 22, was captured in a police ambush on the night of the attacks while he was trying to escape in a stolen car. He confessed his involvement while being interrogated but then retracted his statement when the trial began April 1, alleging that police had coerced and tortured him to extract an admission of guilt.

In Mumbai on Monday, the prosecution in Kasab's case was calling a witness when the defendant announced that he wanted to make a confession.

Kasab, who for months had professed his innocence, said the outlawed, Pakistan-based group Lashkar-i-Taiba was behind the attacks, and he revealed the names of the leaders from the group who trained him.

He said one of the suspects who has been arrested, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, was the mastermind behind the attack, along with others who engineered it and dispatched the gunmen to travel by ship from Karachi, Pakistan, through the Arabian Sea to Mumbai. The attackers had to change boats four times to reach their destination.

Kasab did not accuse Hafiz Sayeed, the founder of Lashkar-i-Taiba, of involvement.

"We were surprised when he abruptly took the stand and pleaded guilty," Ujjwal Nikam, the prosecuting lawyer in the high-profile trial, said in an interview. "The cat is now out of the bag."

Kasab's attorney, Abbas Kazmi, said he was unaware of his client's plans to plead guilty. "It was shocking for everybody, including me," Kazmi told reporters outside the court.

Noting that Kasab was formally charged in a Pakistani court last week with participating in the attack, Kazmi said his client might have decided to confess after concluding he had no real chance of avoiding conviction. In addition to accusing Kasab, Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency charged Lakhvi and several others and said they would be tried in a court in Rawalpindi.

"It is obvious that someone has told Kasab of this," Kazmi said. "Some of his guards who were manning him in jail must have leaked the information to him."

In court Monday, Kasab recounted the start of the siege the night of Nov. 26, saying that he and an accomplice, Abu Ismail, went to a train station restroom and assembled a bomb by installing a timer in it.

"I have confessed. The trial should end now. Sentence me soon," Kasab is reported to have told the judge, according to the Press Trust of India.

A transcript of his courtroom statement is to be sent to the prosecution for review on Tuesday, after which the judge will decide whether to accept the confession and how to proceed.

Kasab's case has moved through India's court system with unusual speed. The daily trial sessions are being held in a fortress-like, makeshift courtroom inside the Mumbai jail compound where Kasab has been held in solitary confinement since November.

Nikam, the prosecutor, said Kasab has "confessed, but also very intelligently."

"He disclosed some information and hid a lot of other crucial information," he said. "Why did he do this and why all of a sudden? Perhaps the events in Pakistan left him feeling that he has no other option anymore."

The prosecutor recalled that Kasab initially told authorities he was underage when he was arrested, apparently hoping for leniency. "He had been trying different tactics all this while to wriggle out of the case," Nikam said. "I feel this is another trick that he is playing to get a lesser sentence."

Top Reformers Admitted Plot, Iran Declares

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — Iranian leaders say they have obtained confessions from top reformist officials that they plotted to bring down the government with a “velvet” revolution. Such confessions, almost always extracted under duress, are part of an effort to recast the civil unrest set off by Iran’s disputed presidential election as a conspiracy orchestrated by foreign nations, human rights groups say.

Reports on Iranian Web sites associated with prominent conservatives said that leading reformers have confessed to taking velvet revolution “training courses” outside the country. Alef, a Web site of a conservative member of Parliament, referred to a video of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who served as vice president in the reform government of former President Mohammed Khatami, as showing that he tearfully “welcomed being defrocked and has confessed to provoking people, causing tension and creating media chaos.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the Revolutionary Guards, Mojtaba Zolnour, said in a speech Thursday that almost everyone now detained had confessed — raising the prospect that more confessions will be made public. Ayatollah Khamenei is supreme religious leader.

The government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners held without charge or legal representation, often subjected to pressure tactics like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, according to human rights groups and former political prisoners. Human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people have been detained.

They fear the confessions are part of a concerted effort to lay the groundwork for banning existing reformist political parties and preventing any organized reform movement in the future. “They hope with this scenario they can expunge them completely from the political process,” said Hadi Ghaemi, coordinator of International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based group. “They don’t want them to come back as part of a political party.”

The confessions are used to persuade a domestic audience that even cultural and academic outreach by some of the nation’s top academics is really cover to usher in a velvet revolution, human rights workers and former prisoners say.

“If they talk about the velvet revolution 24 hours a day people don’t care,” said Omid Memarian, a former Iranian journalist who was arrested and forced to issue his own confession in 2004. “But if reformers and journalists say they are involved in it, it makes the point for them. Once my interrogators said, ‘Whatever you say is worth 100 times more than having a conservative newspaper say the same thing.’ ”

Fars, a semiofficial news agency, reported the confession of a Newsweek reporter, Mazaiar Bahari, that he had done the bidding of foreign governments, as well as a confession by the editor of a newspaper run by Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader. And at Friday Prayer, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said the government planned to put on trial several Iranian employees of the British Embassy — after confessions were extracted.

In addition to Mr. Abtahi, other prominent reformers being held include Abdullah Ramezanzadeh, Mr. Khatami’s spokesman, and Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former deputy interior minister.

In 2007, Iran produced a pseudo-documentary called “In the Name of Democracy,” which served as a vehicle to highlight what it called confessions of three academic researchers charged with trying to overthrow the state. “They don’t like new ideas to get to Iran,” said a researcher once investigated about his work, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They don’t like social and cultural figures in Iranian society to become very popular.”

In 2001, Ali Afshari was arrested for his work as a student leader. He said he was held in solitary confinement for 335 days and resisted confessing for the first two months. But after two mock executions and a five-day stretch where his interrogators would not let him sleep, he said he eventually caved in.

“They tortured me, some beatings, sleep deprivation, insults, psychological torture, standing me for several hours in front of a wall, keeping me in solitary confinement for one year,” Mr. Afshari said in an interview from his home in Washington. “They eventually broke my resistance.”

The problem, he said, was that he was not sure what he was supposed to confess to. So over the next several months, he said, he and his interrogators “negotiated” what he would say — and, more ominously, whom he would implicate. Once his confession was complete, he said, he practiced it for 7 to 10 days, and then it ran on state-run television.

Three years later, Mr. Memarian, the journalist and blogger, was arrested in another security sweep. He said that his interrogator at first sought to humiliate him by forcing him to discuss details of his sex life, and that when he hesitated, the interrogator would grab his hair and smash his head against the wall. He said the interrogator asked him about prominent politicians he had interviewed, asked if they ever had affairs, and asked if he had ever slept with their wives.

“I was crying, I begged him, please do not ask me this,” said Mr. Memarian, who is in exile now in the United States. “They said if you don’t talk now you will talk in a month, in two months, in a year. If you don’t talk now, you will talk. You will just stay here.”

The pressure was agonizing, he said, as he was forced to live in a small cell for 35 days with a light burning all the time and only three trips to the bathroom allowed every 24 hours. He was forced to shower in front of a camera, he said. At one point the interrogators threatened to break his fingers.

“They came up with names, and topics,” he said. “They gave me a three-page analysis and said read this and include it in your confession. My interrogator once said, ‘You have written seven years for the reformists; it’s O.K. to write for us for two months.’ ”

Mr. Memarian said that even in 2004, his interrogators were most interested in several leading reformers, including Mr. Abtahi, who at the time was an adviser to the president. When he was finally released, and after his confession was published by Fars, he was asked to testify before a committee led by the reform government investigating confessions, which included Mr. Abtahi. Mr. Abtahi, who has not been heard from since his arrest on June 16, understood even back then just how vulnerable he was, Mr. Memarian recalled.

“Abtahi said, ‘We cannot guarantee anyone’s security,’ ” Mr. Memarian said. “ ‘We know what happened to you guys. When you leave this building we do not know will happen to you, or what can happen to us in this committee.’ ”

(An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a conservative Web site that referred to a video of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformer. The Web site is Alef, not Atef.)