No treaty, no extradition: Pakistan declines India's request to hand over Hafiz Saeed
Pakistan
Request was made in connection with a money laundering case
ISLAMABAD/NEW DELHI (Web Desk) – As India formally requested for extraditing Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the leader of the banned Jamaatud Dawa (JuD), Pakistan rejected the demand, saying there was mutually agreed arrangement between the two sides to cover the subject.
"Pakistan has received a request from Indian authorities seeking Hafiz Saeed's extradition in a purported money laundering case," Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said in response to media queries.
However, the move isn’t possible as she said no bilateral extradition treaty existed between Pakistan and India – a basic requirement for any demand.
India accuses Saeed of orchestrating cross-border attacks, but the banned outfit's chief denies these allegations.
Saeed, founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a group implicated by the United States and India for the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks, was sentenced to 31 years in prison for two counts of terrorism financing by a Pakistani court.
He was arrested in 2019 when Pakistan was struggling to get out of the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list comprising countries with strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering (AML), counter-terrorism financing (CFT), and proliferation financing regimes.
In 2012, the United States announced a $10 million bounty on Saeed. Both the Lashkar-e-Taiba and JuD are banned entities in the US and under UN sanctions.
Earlier on Friday, Arindam Bagchi, the spokesperson for India’s External Affairs Ministry, emphasised at a media briefing in New Delhi that the extradition request, delivered last week via the Indian high commission in Islamabad, was accompanied by relevant documentation.
However, he acknowledged that the request for Saeed’s transfer to India to stand trial was made despite the lack of an extradition treaty with Islamabad.
