By Mayank Chhaya-
Sixteen years after U.S. prosecutors first claimed in a court memorandum that Dr. Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Canadian of Pakistani origin resident in Chicago, had prior knowledge of the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, his extradition to India has now been cleared.
Rana’s extradition was announced by President Donald Trump in the presence of the visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today. “I am pleased to announce that my administration has approved the extradition of one of the plotters and one of the very evil people of the world, having to do with the horrific 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack to face justice in India,” Trump said.
Rana, once a doctor attached to the Pakistani army, was rearrested on an extradition request from India in June, 2020. His re-arrest in Los Angeles on June 10 that year had come after he was released early from his 14-year-long sentence on compassionate grounds after he said he had tested positive for the COVID-19 virus.
Rana went through appeals against his extradition right up to the U.S. Supreme Court which on January 21 rejected it, ending his quest to avoid being handed over to India.
What is remarkable about the news of his extradition is that its genesis has to do with a memorandum filed in 2009 in the Chicago court of U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber, the then high-profile United States Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald who had said that terror conspiracy suspect Rana remain detained pending trial because he had advance knowledge of the November 26, 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Prosecutors said Rana knew of the impending attacks days before they took place during a visit to Dubai where he was allegedly told about them by a retired Pakistani military officer named Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed.
Rana was also alleged to have even congratulated the perpetrators of the attacks.
That was for the first time that Rana, a Canadian of Pakistani origin resident in Chicago, the Mumbai attacks had been mentioned in the complaint against him. Until then he had been detained for his alleged role in plotting a revenge attack on a Danish newspaper cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Mohammad as a terrorist.
But with the new memorandum, the prosecution had then claimed that “Rana was told of the attacks before they happened and offered compliments and congratulations to those who carried them out afterward.”
Eventually, Rana was convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist plot in Denmark and providing material support to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a terrorist organization operating in Pakistan that was responsible for the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India. Rana was convicted of the charges on June 9, 2011, following a three-week trial in Chicago.
An arrest warrant was issued against Rana in India by a special court of the National Investigation Agency in August 2018.
Rana escaped being convicted of involvement in the Mumbai attacks despite his childhood friendship and help to David Coleman Headley, one of the main plotters of the ghastly attacks, who also lived in Chicago for a period of time. Headley is serving a 35-year sentence currently.
Although Rana’s eventual presence in India is not expected to throw any dramatic new light beyond what the 2009 memorandum had mentioned, it gives New Delhi a significant emotional triumph as it relates to the ghastly Mumbai terror attacks.
