Archive for September 1st, 2011

Pakistan's terror links - the evidence just keeps piling up

Pakistan is incapable of prosecuting terror suspects, according to a US State Department report which reveals that three in four defendants are acquitted.

The report paints a damning portrait of the key United States ally in the war on terror and criticises Islamabad’s failure to outlaw militant Islamic terror groups which escape bans by changing their names.

Islamabad had not closed loopholes which allow criminal gangs to launder funds for terrorist groups and had yet to sufficiently improve its police investigation methods to collect better evidence from crime scenes.

Film footage of the scene of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s 2007 assassination in Rawalpindi being hosed down inspired claims of an official cover-up.

The report comes amid deteriorating relations between the two countries and continuing anger in India at the slow progress in Pakistan’s prosecution of a number of alleged terrorist leaders charged with plotting the 2008 Mumbai massacre. Six Americans were among the 166 victims.

The criticisms are contained in the State Department’s 2010 Country Reports on Terrorism, published last week.
It found that while Pakistan maintained it was committed to prosecuting those accused of terrorism, a study of its Anti-Terrorism Court’s rulings last year disclosed “that Pakistan remained plagued by an acquittal rate of approximately 75 per cent”, and a legal system “almost incapable of prosecuting suspected terrorists”.

You lie down with dogs – you get up with fleas – international Islamo-terror hub Pakistan continues its slide into failed statehood. Every part of its state apparatus is tainted with corruption and terror links.

But the US Administration may have known this much earlier had they been regular readers of this blog.

Full story at the Telegraph