Mohammad Ajmal Kasab’s Bollywood dreams

After first denying that he was the lone surviving Mumbai gunman, and then shocking the court by pleading guilty, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab has changed his story yet again:  Kasab insisted today that this was not the case, smiling as he set out his new version of events. Far from arriving by sea with the other ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

After first denying that he was the lone surviving Mumbai gunman, and then shocking the court by pleading guilty, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab has changed his story yet again: 

After first denying that he was the lone surviving Mumbai gunman, and then shocking the court by pleading guilty, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab has changed his story yet again: 

Kasab insisted today that this was not the case, smiling as he set out his new version of events. Far from arriving by sea with the other gunmen on the night the attacks began, he said, he had pitched up nearly three weeks earlier hoping to break into the Bollywood film industry and had been picked up by the police three days before the attacks for being Pakistani.

It was his misfortune, he claimed, to be the doppelgänger of one of the gunmen shot dead by police. Lacking a culprit to put on trial, they had taken him from his cell the day the attacks were launched, shot him to make it look as if he had been injured in the crossfire and then framed him, he said.

"I was not present in the Chhatrapati Shivaji terminus and I did not open firing inside the railway station. I have never seen an AK-47 in my life, or even a rubber dingy," he told the astonished courtroom.

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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