A day after China blocked a proposal to designate Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Sajid Mir as a global terrorist, India on Wednesday said that it believes something is “genuinely wrong” with the global counter-terrorism architecture.
“If we cannot get established terrorists who have been banned across global landscapes proscribed by the United Nations – for petty geopolitical interests – then we really do not have the genuine political will to sincerely fight this challenge of terrorism,” said Prakash Gupta, the joint secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs at the United Nations.
Gupta was addressing a session of a high-level conference on counter-terrorism at the United Nations.
Mir is one of the key accused person in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. On November 26, 2008, 10 Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists took a sea route from Pakistan to Mumbai and carried out a dozen coordinated shooting and bombing attacks at various major landmarks across the city. The attacks resulted in the deaths of 166 persons, including 26 foreigners.
The United States has a bounty on Mir of $5 million (about Rs 41 crore). In June 2022, he was sentenced to 15 years in jail by a Pakistan court.
Both India and the US had move the proposal to blacklist Mir under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council as a global terrorist and subject him to assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo, according to PTI.
On Wednesday, Gupta, without naming China, said that one must avoid “double standards” and the “self-defeating justification of good terrorists vs bad terrorists”.
“Fifteen years after the Mumbai terror attacks, its masterminds have not yet been brought to justice,” he said. “Some of them continue to roam scot-free – with full state hospitality.”
Last year, China had blocked an attempt by India to designate Talha Saeed, the son of Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed, as a terrorist. India alleged that Talha Saeed has been involved in executing attacks in India and on Indian interests in Afghanistan.
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