Pakistan is incapable of prosecuting terror suspects, according to a US State Department report which reveals that three in four defendants are acquitted.
5:01PM BST 31 Aug 2011
The report paints a damning portrait of the key United States ally in the war on terror and criticises Islamabad's failure to outlaw militant Islamic terror groups which escape bans by changing their names.
Islamabad had not closed loopholes which allow criminal gangs to launder funds for terrorist groups and had yet to sufficiently improve its police investigation methods to collect better evidence from crime scenes. Film footage of the scene of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's 2007 assassination in Rawalpindi being hosed down inspired claims of an official cover-up.
The report comes amid deteriorating relations between the two countries and continuing anger in India at the slow progress in Pakistan's prosecution of a number of alleged terrorist leaders charged with plotting the 2008 Mumbai massacre. Six Americans were among the 166 victims.
The criticisms are contained in the State Department's 2010 Country Reports on Terrorism, published last week.
It found that while Pakistan maintained it was committed to prosecuting those accused of terrorism, a study of its Anti-Terrorism Court's rulings last year disclosed "that Pakistan remained plagued by an acquittal rate of approximately 75 per cent", and a legal system "almost incapable of prosecuting suspected terrorists".
It complained that a new anti-terror bill, which would allow its security agencies to hold suspects for 90 days before bringing them to court and give them a freer hand to use electronic surveillance had not progressed in the country's National Assembly.
Although Islamabad had increased pressure on money-launders and unofficial 'hawala' money transfer agents, "deficiencies remained," the report found. "Notably, the criminalisation of the financing of terrorist acts committed against foreign governments and international organisations was ambiguous, as was the criminalisation of financing groups that have not been explicitly banned by the government or designated by the UN," it stated.
Pakistan's "weak implementation" of a UN Security Council resolution which lists banned terrorist organisations remained a concern.
The report was released as a suicide car bomb yesterday killed at least 11 people and wounded 22 others celebrating Eid in a Shiite Muslim area of the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta.
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