Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde bestows honorifics on terror guru Saeed, addresses him as "Mr" and "Shri"

NEW DELHI: It was a blooper that home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde may find hard to expunge. More than once, he used courtesy titles - Mr and Shri - while referring to Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed, the key conspirator of the Mumbai terror attacks.

Shinde, who said "Mr Saeed" and "Shri Saeed" while making a statement on the visit of Pak interior minister Rehman Malik in Parliament on Monday, drew disapproval from BJP and left the government red-faced.

"Mr Rehman Malik, interior minister of Pakistan has been telling us repeatedly that he had arrested Mr Hafiz Saeed thrice and that on each occasion, he was let off by the courts for lack of evidence," Shinde said in a statement in both Houses of Parliament.

"We had been given to understand by the interior minister of Pakistan that Mr Hafiz Saeed had been arrested on the charges of being a part of the conspiracy for the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. When we pursued this matter, they have given us papers pertaining to the detentions of Shri Hafiz Saeed in 2002 and 2009. From the papers given to us, it is clear that the detentions of Shri Hafiz Saeed in the aforesaid cases were for other reasons and not for his role as a conspirator in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks...," Shinde said