In this story we saw a resident of Farid Kot in Pakistan say that rumors that the Mumbai jihadist Kasab was from there were “absolutely wrong, we don’t know Mohammed Ajmal Kasab and no person having such name lives here.” AP also reported that “Mayor Ghulam Mustafa said police and investigators from Pakistan’s spy agencies had also investigated the gunman’s link to the town and found nothing.”
Well, Muhammad said it: “War is deceit.”
“Revealed: home of Mumbai’s gunman in Pakistan village,” by Saeed Shah in The Observer, December 7 (thanks to the Jawa Report):
[…] Initially villagers were unhelpful. No, said those approached, there was no one known here of that name. Even shown a photograph of Ajmal taken during the Mumbai siege, all swore they did not recognise him. The mayor was clear. ‘There is a man who came to see me called Amir Kasab, who was worried,’ said Ghulam Mustafa Wattoo. ‘He told me that the Ajmal on the news was not his boy. That boy’s gone away to work. There’s no extremist network here.’ […]
But, over time, inconsistencies in the villagers’ accounts heightened suspicion that this was the place. ‘He [Amir] has lived here for a few years,’ said one villager, Mohammad Taj. ‘He has three sons and three daughters.’
Noor Ahmed, a local farmer, said: ‘Amir had a stall he pushed around, sometimes here, sometimes elsewhere. He was a meek man, he wasn’t particularly religious. He just made ends meet and didn’t quarrel with anyone.’
Still the picture was confusing. While sometimes confirming that Amir did live in the village, and had a son called Ajmal, on other occasions locals claimed to know nothing.
Finally one villager confirmed what was going on: ‘You’re being given misinformation. We’ve all known from the first day [of the news of the terrorist attack] that it was him, Ajmal Amir Kasab. His mother started crying when she saw his picture on the television.’…