Wednesday, December 13, 2023 marks the 22nd anniversary of the 2001 attack on Parliament by terrorist groups with links to Pakistan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress Parliamentary Party Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, and other leaders paid tribute to the nine security personnel killed in the attack by observing a minute of silence at the Parliament.
On the morning of December 13, 2001, five terrorists entered the Parliament House Complex at around 11:40 am in a car with a forged Home Ministry sticker on its windshield. The suspicious car was forced to turn back, prompting the terrorists to get out and open fire. This triggered an alarm and all building gates were closed, with over 100 ministers and/or MPs present inside the Parliament at the time.
The firing lasted for over 30 minutes, resulting in the deaths of five terrorists, eight security personnel, and a gardener, with 15 others injured.
Then Home Minister L K Advani stated that the attack was carried out jointly by Pakistan-based terrorist outfits — Lashkar-e-Taiba and. According to the investigation, he said that “all five terrorists who formed the suicide squad were Pakistani nationals. Their Indian associates have since been apprehended and arrested.”
Advani referred to the attack as “the most audacious, and also the most alarming act of terrorism in the nearly two-decades-long history of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in India.”
Following an FIR registered by the police on the same day of the attack, the Delhi Police arrested Mohammad Afzal Guru, a former Kashmir Liberation Front militant who had surrendered in 1994, his cousin Shaukat Husain Guru, Shaukat’s wife Afsan Guru, and S A R Geelani, a lecturer of Arabic at Delhi University.
Guru, Geelani, and Shaukat were sentenced to death, and Afsan was acquitted by a trial court on December 29, 2001. Geelani was acquitted in 2003, while Shaukat was sentenced to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment in 2005. In September 2006, the court ordered that Afzal Guru be hanged.
The then President Pranab Mukherjee, on February 3, 2013, rejected the mercy petition filed by Guru’s wife, and he was hanged six days later. His remains were buried in the Tihar jail.
