'FIA failed to provide evidence against Lakhvi'

Pakistani prosecutors have failed to provide 'concrete evidence' linking Lashkar-e-Tayiba commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi to the 2008 Mumbai attacks even after a lapse of nearly two years since the terror siege, one of the lawyers defending Lakhvi has said.

The Federal Investigation Agency, which probed the Mumbai terror attacks and arrested Lakhvi, has "failed to furnish concrete evidence against" him, lawyer Shahbaz Ahmed Janjua told the media in Rawalpindi on Monday.

Janjua claimed the anti-terrorism court conducting the trial of Lakhvi and six others accused of involvement in the Mumbai terror attack had rejected four applications filed by the FIA. The FIA is "now wasting the court's precious time by submitting another application just to prolong the hearing,"  he said.

The FIA has not handed over the statements of Indian doctors who conducted the autopsies of victims of the Mumbai attacks and treated the injured, he claimed. Janjua further claimed that the FIA has not presented a record of persons who were arrested in India in connection with the incident.

"On our request, the court has ordered the FIA to produce the said documents on the next hearing," he said. Janjua said it was 'very strange' that the crime had been committed in India while the trial was being conducted in Pakistan.

The next hearing of the Mumbai terror attacks case by the Rawalpindi-based anti-terrorism court is scheduled for October 16.

Lakhvi and the other suspects, most of them operatives of the banned LeT, have been charged with planning and facilitating the attacks in India's financial hub that killed 166 people in November 2008.