India claims to have concrete evidence to prove the involvement of Pakistan’s ISI in the Mumbai terror attacks carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives last week.
NEW DELHI: India claims to have concrete evidence to prove the involvement of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the Mumbai terror attacks carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives last week.
“India has the names of trainers, where the training took place, and the use of addresses linked to the ISI in the past,” an intelligence source said on Thursday. The Lashkar-e-Taiba has close links to the ISI and, by extension, the Pakistan army.
Though the Lashkar-e-Taiba is banned in Pakistan, its leader Hafiz Mohammed Saeed is based in Pakistan and runs a front organisation called the Jamaat-ud-Dawah. Saeed is among the fugitives, including gangster Dawood Ibrahim and Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar, whom New Delhi wants extradited from Pakistan.
The US is also putting pressure on Pakistan to arrest Saeed. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, who was in Pakistan on Monday, is believed to have told Pakistan that
Washington had enough evidence to show a Pakistani hand in the Mumbai attacks.
The Lashkar chief, however, has denied any involvement in the strikes. In an interview to be published in Outlook magazine, the LeT founder says: “I can say with authority that the Lashkar-e-Taiba did not attack Mumbai… we are not in the business of attacking civilians.” He alleged that Indian officials were brandishing “cooked up” confessions and said New Delhi often used Pakistan as a punching bag to cover up its own deficiencies.
Meanwhile, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who stopped over for a few hours in Islamabad on her way back home from New Delhi, spoke privately to the Pakistani authorities on the need to curb the Lashkar and arrest its leader.
In public, Rice praised Pakistan’s democratic government and said after talks with president Asif Ali Zardari and prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani: “I found the Pakistani leadership very focused and committed to act.”
Rice said she spoke “at length [about] the attacks in Mumbai” and about the importance of Pakistan taking responsibility to deal with “those who may use Pakistani territory even if they are non-state actors.”
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