Backing India’s line that the Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, Britain’s prime minister Gordon Brown talked tough with Pakistan
NEW DELHI: Backing India’s line that the Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, Britain’s prime minister Gordon Brown talked tough with Pakistan on Sunday, telling Islamabad bluntly that “time has come for action and not words”.
After talks with prime minister Manmohan Singh during an unscheduled visit to New Delhi following rising tensions between the neighbours, Brown asserted that the deadly attacks in Mumbai had been carried out by Lashar-e-Taiba.
Making it clear that Islamabad would “have a great deal to answer for”, Brown said, “We know that the group responsible for the Mumbai attacks is Lashkar-e-Taiba.”
He said the world community must come together to ensure that there were “no safe havens for terrorists” and “no safe place for those who finance terrorist activities”.
Like US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the British prime minister also spoke of the need to trace the money trail and ensure that funds which pour in for so-called jihadi activities are frozen.
Brown, who flew into the capital from Afghanistan, was given a detailed briefing by Singh on the terror strikes in Mumbai and Lashkar’s hand in the attacks.
Brown later flew to Islamabad where he told reporters after talks with Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari that three-fourths of major terror plots investigated in the UK had links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan. The British prime minister has asked India to allow British police to interrogate Mohammad Ajmal Amir, the sole captured terrorist now in the custody of the Mumbai Police. Brown is said to have similarly requested Zardari to allow interrogation of those arrested in Pakistan for their suspected involvement in the Mumbai attacks. A British citizen and two other people with dual Indian-British nationality were among the 188 killed in the attacks.
Asking Pakistan to “break the chain of terror that links the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the streets of the UK and other countries around the world”, Brown offered it a comprehensive $9 million package under a new counter-terrorism pact.
Britian has a large number of South Asians who are influenced by the ideology of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The attack on the London underground soon after Brown took over as PM could be traced to British nationals of Pakistan origin. London has been closely following the links between British jihadis and Pakistan and Afghanistan. “We all have an interest in discovering what lay behind the attacks,” Brown said.
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