Key Suspect in 2008 Mumbai Attacks Granted Bail

A Pakistani court Thursday granted bail to a militant commander accused of orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, drawing loud protests from India.

The suspect, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, is a senior commander with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group behind the blitz of attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai that left 166 people dead and gravely worsened the relationship between Pakistan and India. He has been on trial since 2009.

The slow pace of the trial, which is closed to the news media, has been a continuing source of contention with India, which accuses the Pakistani authorities of tacitly supporting Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Lakhvi's lawyer, Rizwan Abbasi, said his client had been granted a release on bond of about $5,000. The Federal Investigation Agency, a Pakistani law enforcement agency, opposed bail.

Indian officials protested Lakhvi's release and called for it to be immediately reversed. Syed Akbaruddin, spokesman of the Indian government's Ministry of External Affairs, said it would "serve as a reassurance to terrorists who perpetrate heinous crime."

Still, the granting of bail does not necessarily mean Lakhvi will walk out of the prison soon. The government can keep him under detention under a special legal provision known as Maintenance of Public Order, as has been the case in the past when some high-profile terror suspects were granted bails by local courts.

The significance of the bail hearing was heightened by the assault by the Pakistani Taliban on a school in Peshawar on Tuesday that killed 148 people, nearly all schoolchildren.

A day after the attack, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared Pakistan would no longer distinguish between "good" and "bad" Taliban - an approach that drew frequent criticism from Indian and Western officials.

Experts say the Pakistan military ambiguous approach to militancy - fighting certain groups, like the Pakistani Taliban, but turning a blind eye to others that share its strategic objectives, like Lashkar - is hampering the army's ability to prevent atrocities like the Peshawar school massacre.

The Peshawar attack provoked strong sympathy for Pakistan in India, where newspapers covered the story with banner headlines.

That Thursday's bail decision came just two days after such an attack struck Indians as deeply unfortunate and a lost opportunity for the two countries to have a shared purpose against militancy.

Barkha Dutt, a prominent news anchor with the Indian news channel NDTV, wrote on Twitter: "There cant be one rule for Peshawar, another for Mumbai. The Lakhvi Verdict is nothing short of Bailing out Terrorism."

Pakistani officials attribute the delays in Lakhvi's case to the country's notoriously weak judicial system; some openly admit that judges are frequently subjected to intimidation from militant groups or the military.

Cyril Almeida, an editor at the newspaper The Dawn in Pakistan, said the court decision seemed to be influenced by deteriorating relations between the two countries.

"The hawkish elements in the Pakistani establishment think that it is not a time to show weakness," he said. "On a day like today, the bail suggests that some sort of signaling is going on."

Lakhvi was arrested in 2009 on suspicion of directing the Mumbai attacks, in which a team of Pakistani militants infiltrated the Indian city by sea, then went on a killing rampage in hotels, a cafe, a railway station and a Jewish center.

Ajmal Kasab, the only surviving gunman, told Indian interrogators that Lakhvi had orchestrated the attack by phone from a base in Pakistan. Kasab was later convicted of murder and conspiracy, and was executed in 2012.

Although the Pakistani authorities cracked down on Lashkar after the 2008 attacks, the group has since re-established itself under its leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who lives openly in the eastern city of Lahore.

The United States has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to Saeed's arrest, but he enjoys police protection and runs a large charity that has taken a prominent role in relief efforts after natural disasters such as the floods in 2010.

Saeed is also a regular feature at rallies and on Pakistani television. This week, he condemned the Peshawar school attack as an act of terrorism. "The killing of innocent children is not jihad," he said.

But Saeed was also cited as blaming India for the Peshawar assault and pledging to take revenge.

More broadly speaking, the role of Lashkar and the fate of figures like Lakhvi are tied to the decades-old dispute between Pakistan and India over the mountain territory of Kashmir.

Tensions between the two countries have risen since Narendra Modi became prime minister of India in May. Prolonged bouts of shelling from the armies on each side of their disputed border, which continued into November, have killed several dozen civilians and a smaller number of soldiers.

(Gardiner Harris contributed reporting from New Delhi)