New Delhi, May 29
India may approach a New York court to be a party to a lawsuit, filed by the family of 26/11 victims Rabbi Gavriel Noah Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, to declare the ISI, Pakistan’s spy agency, as a terrorist group.Armed with many documents, which prove the ISI’s links with terror groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba, India may implead itself in the lawsuit filed in the federal court to help the petitioners as well as declaring the ISI as a terrorist outfit.

“Our main purpose is to help the family of the Rabbi to get justice as well as to prove in the New York court the ISI’s direct link with terror outfits like the LeT which carried out the Mumbai attack,” a government official said.

If the New York court is convinced about the ISI’s role in the 26/11 attack, it will strengthen the case of declaring the ISI as terrorist outfit by the US and the UN. The disclosure of LeT operative David Headley in a Chicago court that he was in constant contact with ISI officials and he received espionage training from the agency is also likely to strengthen the lawsuit.

Headley’s testimony in the trial of Pakistani-Canadian Tahawwur Rana in a Chicago court that the Pakistani spy agency and its operatives like Major Iqbal and LeT founder Hafiz Saeed had helped him in laying the groundwork for the Mumbai attacks has exposed Islamabad’s role in 26/11, the government official said.

Through records of several emails exhibited in the court, federal prosecutors established beyond doubt that Headley was in constant contact with ISI officials, in particular Major Iqbal, and his handlers in Pakistan. In one of the emails to his ISI handler Major Iqbal, Headley writes about the latest spying gadgets. Headley told the court that Iqbal made key decisions and was indeed the mastermind of the 26/11 plot. “If we become party to the lawsuit, all these will come as great help in proving our point that ISI is nothing but a global terrorist organisation,” the official said. —PTI