US confident of bringing to justice other 6 charged in 26/11

Chicago, Jan 25: The United States has said it will continue to bring to justice the other six people named in Mumbai terror attacks case, including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) leaders.

"They are fugitives. If we can ever get our hands on them, we will try to arrest them, or have them arrested depending on what country they are found in and extradite to the United States and prosecute them here in the US," Acting US Attorney Gary S Shapiro told reporters after Headley was sentenced to 35 years of imprisonment by a Chicago court.

These six individuals named in the indictment, besides Tahawwur Rana, who was sentenced last week, and Headley (sentenced yesterday), are Illyas Kashmiri, Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed alias Pasha, Sajid Mir, Abu Qahafa, Mazhar Iqbal and Major Iqbal. Of these, Illyas Kashmiri is reported to have died in a US drone attack and rest five are said to be in Pakistan.

"I think there are those who think these are kind of meaningless exercise, and that the US Government would never get its hand on these fugitives, but you know, you could have said the same thing 15 years ago about some of the drug lords in Columbia, you could have said the same thing 10 years ago about cartel members in Mexico; those countries changed dramatically and we extradited many of these people to the United States, with some of them to Chicago," Shapiro said.

"So we have hopes that we can prosecute them and certainly going to keep looking for them," he said. "All I said was, we are continuing those investigation – we make no prediction on anything that would come form those investigations," Shapiro said in response to a question.

[See: Possibility of Headley's extradition to India: US attorney]

PTI