Pakistani villagers confirm home of captured gunman

McClatchy Newspapers

FARIDKOT, near Depalpur, Pakistan — The lone gunman captured alive by Indian police during the terrorist attack on Mumbai a week and a half ago comes from a dirt-poor village in Pakistan’s southern Punjab region where a banned Islamist group has been actively recruiting young men for “jihad,” according to residents of the village and official records seen by McClatchy Newspapers.

Ajmal Ameer Kasab, the dark- haired 21-year-old man arrested by Indian authorities in the first hours of the assault — in which more than 170 people died — left the village four years ago, several residents said. He would return once a year to his small family home, and one villager recalled his talking about freeing the Muslim-dominated region of Kashmir from India.

His origins are a key to the investigation of the attack and could have a profound impact on relations between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, already at the brink of confrontation. Until now, the Pakistan government has repeatedly said that there was no solid evidence to back Indian accusations that the gunmen came from Pakistan.

A McClatchy reporter visited the village three times in four days and obtained official electoral records, which showed that Ajmal’s parents, as named by the Indian authorities, indeed reside in the village.

At the time of the first visit Wednesday, there was no sign of Pakistan plainclothes police. But village mayor Ghulam Mustafa Wattoo confirmed that a man named Ameer lives in Faridkot, with a son named Ajmal. He said Ameer claimed his son was not the man captured by Indian authorities.

But everything in the village fit the details leaked from the Indian police interrogation of Ajmal. Indian police identified the father as Mohammad Ameer, who earns a meager living selling home-made snacks from a mobile cart, and his wife as Noor. At the tiny family house, on a narrow street deep inside Faridkot, the McClatchy reporter on a second visit Friday noted a mobile food cart lying in the courtyard.

Ameer, 44, and his wife, Noor, 47, were nowhere to be found. According to several villagers, who asked not to be identified for their own security, “a bearded mullah” took them away during the night, likely, they thought, to be a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic extremist group accused of being behind the Mumbai attack.

Wattoo led the visiting reporter to Ameer’s house, where an elderly man named Sultan and a middle-aged woman named Miraj, who identified themselves as relatives, said the occupants had gone away “for a wedding.”

But they gave inconsistent and changing stories, sometimes confirming that Ameer lives there, at other times denying it. The mayor, too, had attempted to delay the visit of a McClatchy reporter to the house Friday and changed his story at times. As a result of the delay, plainclothes Pakistani security officials got to the house before the reporter, and they appeared to have coached the occupants to throw visitors off the trail.

A villager, who asked not to be named for his own safety, told McClatchy: “These people are telling you lies. We know that boy [caught in Mumbai] is from Faridkot. We knew from the first night [of the attack].”

Shown a picture of Ajmal, he confirmed it was the young man from the village.

Another resident said separately that he recognized the face in the photograph, though he later changed his mind when other villagers crowded around.

“He [Ameer] has lived here for a few years,” said villager Mohammad Taj, an agriculturalist, who thought his age was around 50. “He has three sons and three daughters.”

Residents said that Faridkot and the area, including a nearby village called Tara Singh, are a hotbed for recruitment for Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The nazim, or mayor, of Tara Singh, Rao Zaeem Haider, said: “There is a religious trend here. Some go for jihad but not too many.”

Ajmal, who had little or no schooling, has been gone from Faridkot for about four years but would return to see his family once a year, said several local residents. One said he would talk about freeing the Kashmir region from Indian rule when he returned, — the main aim of Lashkar-e-Taiba.