The curious case of disappearance of Kasab's family from Pak

Islamabad, Nov 24: The 25-year-old Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terrorist Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab was executed at Yerwada Jail in Pune on Wednesday, Nov 21. Official sources say his body was buried in the jail premises. Nobody representing Pakistani authorities or Kasab's family demanded his body.

Authorities from Pakistan not coming out openly and demanding his body is understandable. But why there is no request from his family? If reports of Pakistani journalists are to be believed then Kasab's family has disappeared from Faridkot village in Pakistan's Punjab and nobody knows their whereabouts. Now, questions that are arising are - Where is Kasab's family? Are they alive? If they are alive, where are they hiding? The Pakistani authorities have to answer all these questions.

"Amir Shahban Kasab (father of Ajmal Kasab), 56, took his family away to an unknown destination," said a village man in Faridkot to Pakistan-based journalist. Kasab's father was a vendor who sold samosas and pakoras from a handcart in the village. But after Kasab was caught in Mumbai, the family, including his younger sister Suraiyya and younger brother Munir, vanished. We haven't heard from them in four years," Mahmood said.

Very few people know who exactly was Kasab? Specific details are hard to pin down. Indian officials originally portrayed him as a middle-class boy who spoke good English. According to media reports, he belonged to a poor family in Faridkot in the Punjab province of Pakistan and his father used to sell food.

Kasab is said to have received little education. Media reports say that he had spent his youth alternating between labouring and petty crime. In an interview with Pakistani media, a resident of Faridkot identified Kasab as his son. He said that he had left home four years before the attacks. "He had asked me for new clothes on Eid festival that I couldn't provide him. He got angry and left," Dawn newspaper quoted Kasab's father as saying.

Some sources said his father asked him to join Lashkar-e-Taiba so that he could use the money they gave him to run the family. When asked about this, Kasab's father told reporters, "I don't sell my sons." Villagers of Okara claimed on camera that he was at their village six months before the Mumbai attack.

They said that he asked his mother to bless him as he was going for Jihad and claimed that he demonstrated his wrestling skills to a few village boys that day. Kasab, 21 at the time, was the only surviving member of the group that launched a bloody rampage across the Mumbai city, killing 166 people. Only after several months, Pakistan admitted that he was one of their citizens.

OneIndia News