The strange court case of the man alleged to be the sole Mumbai terrorist to be caught alive during last year’s attacks on the city took yet another bizarre turn today when he retracted his confession and claimed to be a wannabe film star.

When the case began in April Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, claimed to be a child. He pleaded innocent and accused the police of beating a confession out of him.

Then, taking his own defence lawyer by surprise in July, the Pakistani national confessed to being part of the most audacious terrorist atrocity since 9/11. He said that he was “ready to hang”.

Now Mr Kasab has again denied having any part to play in an attack that left 166 people dead.

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Smiling as he made a statement to a packed, high-security courtroom, he retracted his previous admission of guilt. He had been in Mumbai hoping to break into the Bollywood film industry, he said, and had been framed.

There was no truth to the elaborate details that he had earlier supplied of how he had been recruited by militants in Pakistan, been part of a rigorous training programme and then sent by sea to Mumbai to kill as many people as possible.

Instead, he said that he was picked up by the police on the day before the attacks on November 26.

He said that there was no truth in the allegation that he had been a footsoldier for the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist faction, the group believed to be behind the commando-style assault on two luxury hotels, Mumbai’s main train station, a Jewish centre and a backpacker bar.

“I was not present at VT,” he said, referring to Victoria Terminus, the former name of Mumbai’s main railway station where he is accused of opening fire, killing 52 people and injuring over 100.

“I do not know what has happened. Witnesses have come and recognised me because my face looks similar to the terrorists.”

The move was the latest in a bizarre series of events that has characterized what was billed by the local media as India’s “trial of the century”.

Even before the court proceedings began, the process was blighted by controversy when lawyers chosen to defend Mr Kasab were hounded by Hindu extremists and threatened with violence.

During the trial, two defence lawyers were dismissed in succession for professional misconduct.

The twists and turns of the case, which has been heard by a single judge in a courtroom protected by a specially constructed, 50ft (15m) rocket-proof cage, have made front page news in India.

Everything from Mr Kasab’s demands for meat biryani (the food in his prison is entirely vegetarian) to his literary habits (he was said to be reading Gandhi’s autobiography) have been picked apart with forensic scrutiny.

In recent months he has complained of being ill. At one stage he produced a white powder from a screw of paper and presented it to the judge, saying that it was poison that his prison guards had tried to add to his food.

At stake throughout has been his life. Mr Kasab, who became known as the “baby-faced gunman” after CCTV footage of him wielding an AK-47 during the attacks was shown, is accused of murder and of waging war on India — crimes that carry the death penalty.

However, there is ample time for the case to take several more strange turns yet.

Legal experts say that even if Mr Kasab is sentenced to hang it is likely to be at least five years before he exhausts his rights to appeal the verdict.

Only then could he be sent to the gallows, a punishment reserved in India for “the rarest of rare cases”.

Convicts in previous terror trials in India have avoided death for years. Mohammad Afzal, a member of the Jaish-e-Mohammed terror ground who launched a deadly commando raid on the Indian Parliament in Delhi in 2001, remains on India’s equivalent of death row.

Nalini Murugan, found guilty of the murder of the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, had her death sentence commuted to life imprisonment after Sonia Gandhi, his widow and now leader of the ruling Congress Party, intervened. UK Times