Tahawwur Rana, a businessman from Chicago, has been granted extradition to India, where he is wanted for his involvement in the 2008 Mumbai terror attack.
Rana was found guilty in 2011 of funding an Islamic extremist group that was held responsible for the attack on the financial hub of India that left 166 people dead.
He was exonerated, however, of the more severe accusation of aiding in the attack’s planning.
After India requested his extradition in 2020, the businessman was detained.
Rana, who vigorously rejected all of the allegations levelled against him, had opposed India’s request for extradition, which the US government had also backed.
But on Monday, a judge approved his extradition. According to the court, Rana had been accused in India with murder, terrorist actions, and criminal conspiracy, all of which are extraditable offences under the US-India treaty.
Rana will, however, continue to be held in US custody until the Secretary of State for India makes a final judgement regarding his extradition, it was said.
When a group of ten men stormed a train station, hotels, cafes, and a Jewish centre in November 2008, they shot and threw bombs, killing more than 160 people.
Rana, a Canadian of Pakistani descent, was charged by Indian officials with planning the attack alongside his childhood buddy David Coleman Headley. The attack was allegedly carried out by the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
According to the case’s prosecutors, Headley utilised the Mumbai office of his Chicago-based immigration services company as cover in 2006 to research locations for the 2008 attack.
Rana was additionally charged with enabling Headley to impersonate a representative of his company in order to enter newspaper offices by pretending to be interested in buying advertising space.
In 2011, Headley testified against Rana and is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence in the US for his involvement in the attacks.
At the time, Headley, an old buddy from their days in a Pakistani military school, was accused of manipulating and deceiving Rana by his defence team.
Rana was found guilty in 2011 by a federal jury in Chicago of supporting LeT and participating in a foiled plot to attack a Danish newspaper. However, charges of direct complicity in the Mumbai attacks were dropped against him.
He received a 14-year prison term in 2013. After testing positive for Covid-19 in 2020, Rana was compassionately released from prison in the US. After India requested his extradition, he was detained once more.
