World awaits justice for 26/11 victims

After nearly 13 months of hearings, the eyes of the world media will be fixed on Arthur Road jail, where a special court will hand down a verdict on Pakistani gunman Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab today.

For the American families of the victims, the wait for the verdict has set off intense emotions and pangs of loss as they struggle to obtain closure.

Judge ML Tahaliyani’s court convenes on Monday at the Arthur Road prison where Kasab is being held, a possible death sentence in the offing for the defendant.

“It does bring up a wave of emotion although I’ve never really been without the feelings of loss and grief. But it does intensify it,” said a soft-spoken Kia Scherr, whose husband Alan, 58, and daughter, Naomi, 13, were killed at Oberoi Hotel. They were there as part of a 25-member Synchronicity Foundation team exploring yoga and meditation.

“In general, I don’t favour the death penalty. But, I respect whatever the Indian judicial system decides. They need to do what they need to do. Personally, what I favour is imprisonment, education and rehabilitation.”

Scherr has co-founded an organisation called ‘One Life Alliance’ to honour the sacredness of life. She is currently conducting workshops in New York on forgiveness. She has also been invited to speak at a Muslim mosque in Northern Virginia and several US institutions.

“I just can’t sit back and be bitter. I want to make a positive contribution by sending out a message of love and peace,” said Scherr, who plans to visit Mumbai this year to retrace her husband and daughter’s last journey, in India.

“I really want to meet the people in Mumbai. My husband and daughter were having the time of their lives in India. They loved the people, the food and the colours. My husband could have lived there – he loved the place so much,” said Scherr.

The FBI regularly updates Scherr on David Headley, who played an integral part in the attacks. “I don’t know how the plea bargain [that Headley has struck for a lighter sentence] works, but if I have an opportunity to go to the sentencing, I would like to address him. I would say: ‘Here I am. I’m the mother and wife of two who were killed. Here, see their photos.’ I want him to see there are human beings who are affected by this,” Scherr said.

Even though the verdict will make headlines in the US media, does the US government actually care what happens to Kasab?

“I think the government probably cares that Indians are satisfied,” explains Mira Kamdar, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York and author of Planet India. “The US is the only advanced economy in the world that imposes the death penalty as it did with Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist behind the Oklahoma City attack in 1995. So, the death penalty for Kasab will probably seem appropriate.”

Personally Kamdar, who lost a cousin — Reshma Parekh and her husband Sunil — in the tragedy, has a different take. “I will feel no gratification, satisfaction or relief if Kasab is given the death sentence. As much as I mourn their deaths, I oppose the death penalty, and don’t believe state murder serves the interests of justice. The persons I would like to see punished are Kasab’s handlers – the people who gave the orders, who turned him into a killing robot —as well as Headley.”

“When the masterminds behind these attacks are punished, their networks destroyed, and when conditions of dire poverty that lead people such as Kasab’s parents to literally sell their children to terrorists, are addressed, only then will I feel justice has been served,” she said.

Over a year later, the three-day rampage still rattles people in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the nerve centre of the Lubavitch community and the neighbourhood where Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg grew up. Holtzberg and his wife Rivka were was brutally tortured before being killed by the terrorists who struck at the Jewish centre in Nariman House. Their two-year-old son Moshe was saved by his quick-thinking Indian nanny.

“I can’t speak for everybody but I want justice to be done,” said a friend of Rabbi Holtzberg, who works in a Chabad house in Brooklyn. He said he felt pained that there was “nothing accidental” in Muslim terrorists killing the only New York rabbi in Mumbai.

However, a guilty verdict and death sentence could lead to a lengthy appeal in higher courts. Despite maintaining capital punishment, which is reserved for what the Supreme Court rules as the “rarest of rare” cases, India has only executed two people since 1998.