ISLAMABAD: Pakistan, on Friday, confirmed that it has received a request from India seeking the extradition of Jamaatud Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Saeed in a so-called money laundering case and made it clear that there exists no bilateral extradition treaty between the two countries.

Responding to media queries regarding India’s request to extradite Hafiz Saeed, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch confirmed that a request was received from the Indian side.

“Pakistan has received a request from the Indian authorities, seeking extradition of Hafiz Saeed in a so-called money laundering case,” she said.

However, she made it clear that no bilateral extradition treaty exists between Pakistan and India.

Hence, Pakistan is not bound to extradite its citizen - Hafiz Saeed- to India.

Earlier in the day, Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi, in a briefing to reporters in New Delhi, confirmed that India has formally requested Pakistan to extradite Hafiz Saeed due to his alleged involvement in the Mumbai attacks.

“We have conveyed a request along with relevant supporting documents to the government of Pakistan,” Bagchi told his weekly media briefing in New Delhi on Friday.

A day earlier, Foreign Office spokesperson Baloch termed similar media reports pertaining to India’s request to extradite Hafiz Saeed as “speculative” and refused to comment on them.

“This question is based on speculative reporting and we would not like to comment on speculative reports,” she said in response to a question during her weekly media briefing on Thursday when asked whether the Indian government has made any such request to extradite Hafiz Saeed or not.

Pushed by the United States and India, going after Hafiz Saeed and his Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) was also one of the key conditions by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) prior to Pakistan’s removal from the “grey list” of the global watchdog on anti-money laundering (AML) and combating terrorism financing (CFT) in October 2022.

Prior to Pakistan’s exit from the FATF’s “grey list”, the government had made its Director-General of Military Operations (DGMO) in-charge for the implementation of FATF recommendations. This was a turning point when Pakistan finally decided to take the FATF threat seriously and started delivering on conditions that it had resisted long.

Pakistani courts started handing over sentences to JuD chief Hafiz Saeed, with the latest one given in April 2022 when he was awarded a combined sentence of 33 years imprisonment in two cases of terror financing.

Earlier on November 19, 2020, the JuD chief was convicted in another terror financing case and sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison. An anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Lahore had convicted Hafiz Saeed, who was already in jail serving two sentences of five-and-a-half-years each, handed down to him in February 2020.

Pakistan had arrested him several times since the 9/11 attacks in the US, but it never charged him with specific offences and always set him free in the end. Hafiz Saeed was put under house arrest on a number of occasions, first when the Indian government blamed him for masterminding the December 2001 attack on its parliament, and then after the Mumbai train bombings of 2006.

He was also put under house arrest several times between 2008 and 2009

following accusations that his then Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) was involved in 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023