Advani promises death to Afzal Guru within 100 days

The BJP today promised that if the National Democratic Alliance led by it is voted into power, it will recommend within 100 days the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.

Giving this assurance, LK Advani, the party's prime ministerial candidate, questioned the government's handling of the case. "Now the UPA regime is coming to an end, will the prime minister tell the nation why his government chose not to hang Afzal Guru despite a clear verdict of the Supreme Court upholding his death sentence?" he said in his concluding remarks at the end of the three-day BJP national council meeting.

"Here is our warning to the merchants of death and their sponsors," Advani said. "We shall follow a zero-tolerance and zero-compromise approach to dealing with terrorism."

Posing questions to Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi on internal security, Advani demanded a high-level judicial probe into the Mumbai attacks to unearth what went wrong and recommend ways of preventing such incidents. He asked why this had not been done yet.

Firing a salvo at former Union home minister Shivraj Patil, Advani said he was removed for his "incompetence" but asked "at whose behest" he had been retained in that crucial post for four-and-a-half years.

Advani criticised the UPA for its earlier opposition to stronger laws against terrorism. "Maintaining for four-and-a-half years that no special anti-terror law was needed and that existing laws were adequate to deal with the menace, now the UPA government has brought in two anti-terror laws in the wake of the Mumbai terror attack," he said, and asked if the prime minister would be honest enough to admit that his government had erred on the issue?

On the issue of immigrants from Bangladesh, Advani asked why the UPA government "deliberately and contemptuously showed disregard" to the Supreme Court directive to enact laws to curb infiltration. The apex court has described this infiltration as "external aggression", he said.