Senior Congress leader and former home minister P Chidambaram on Thursday dismissed Union minister Amit Shah’s Afzal Guru claim as a “ mixture of insinuation, lie, and distortion.” Clarifying his position, Chidambaram said that during his tenure, the mercy petition filed by Guru’s wife was still under consideration by the President.Union minister Amit Shah on Wednesday in Rajya Sabha said that the death sentence for Afzal Guru, who was convicted for the terror attack on Parliament, could not be carried out for long as P Chidambaram was home minister. Replying to the claims, Chidambaram clarified that the law is that a sentence of death cannot be carried out until the mercy petition is disposed of.“Home Minister Amit Shah made a statement in the Rajya Sabha that ‘Afzal Guru could not be executed as long as P Chidambaram was Home Minister’. The statement is a mixture of insinuation, lie and distortion After the conviction and sentence by the Courts, Afzal Guru’s wife filed, on his behalf, a mercy petition to the President of India in October 2006,” Chidambaram said in a post on X. ” The President rejected the mercy petition on 3-2-2013. Afzal Guru was hanged six days later on 9-2-2013. I was Home Minister during 1-12-2008 and 31-7-2012. During the entire period, the mercy petition was pending before the President. The law is that a sentence of death cannot be carried out until the mercy petition is disposed of,” he added. During the special discussion on Operation Sindoor and Operation Mahadev in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, Shah hit out at Congress for manufacturing the thesis of “saffron terror” to malign majority community as part of its politics of appeasement.“They tried to give terrorism a religious colour for the sake of votes – but people of India rejected that falsehood,” he said. Shah recalled the effort in some quarters to blame Hindutva outfits for the 26/11 terror attacks that Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out in Mumbai, and said Congress neta Digvijaya Singh was among those who fanned it.He also recalled the effort in some quarters to blame Hindutva outfits for the 26/11 terror attacks that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) carried out. “All this was done for political gain. Innocent people were jailed, tortured and defamed – not in pursuit of justice but to build a story that served electoral purposes,” Shah said, without naming names.His attack came on the eve of a court judgment in the Malegaon terror blasts case – the first case allegedly involving members of Abhinav Bharat, supposedly an extremist Hindutva outfit.