India said on Sunday it would give Pakistan evidence found by its investigators linking Pakistan’s spy agency and an Islamist militant group based there to deadly bomb blasts in Mumbai that killed 186 people in July.
The comments by India’s new foreign secretary, Shiv Shankar Menon, came a day after police in Mumbai, the country’s financial hub, said they had solid proof that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency had masterminded the carnage.
Police said the serial blasts on rush-hour commuter trains and crowded station platforms had been executed by pro-Pakistan militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, using its Pakistani and Indian operatives, as well as members of an outlawed hard-line Indian Muslim students’ group.
”We will judge them not by immediate reactions or verbal statements [but] by what they actually do about terrorism,” Menon told reporters after taking office.
”It seems to me logical that the mechanism has to deal with this kind of evidence,” he added, referring to a bilateral agreement to set up a joint agency to tackle terrorism.
Pakistan and Lashkar have both rejected the Indian accusations. A Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson called them baseless and irresponsible.
Tariq Azim Khan, Pakistan’s Minister of State for Information, said Islamabad would investigate the allegations if New Delhi shared its evidence.
Mumbai police chief AN Roy said on Saturday at least 12 Indian men and 11 Pakistanis had been involved in the bombings.
Many of the Indians alleged to have been involved had visited Pakistan several times and trained at Lashkar bases in Bahawalpur town in Punjab province, close to the Indian frontier, he said.
Test for joint agency
One of the Pakistani men brought over about 15kg to 20kg of RDX explosives to make the bombs in Mumbai, and funds to stage the attack came from Pakistan via a Lashkar operative in Saudi Arabia, Roy said.
The South Asian rivals agreed to set up the joint agency on terrorism after talks between Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of a Non-Aligned summit in Havana two weeks ago.
The two leaders also agreed to resume a peace process that India had frozen following the Mumbai attacks.
The agency has come in for strong criticism from Indian opposition parties and most security experts even before its formation.
Indian critics say that a similar counter-terrorism mechanism was already in place and had failed to make any progress and they did not see how this one would be different.
Islamabad could not be expected to act against its own military spy agency, which New Delhi blames for many violent attacks and subversive activities across the country, they say.
Some Indian analysts, however, say that the mechanism needs to be tested and the Mumbai bombings are a fitting case.
Menon, who was India’s envoy to Pakistan before being named foreign secretary and is seen as one of the architects of the joint panel, defended it.
”We will judge its success or its failure by how it deals with it [terrorism] and what actions Pakistan takes on terrorism,” he said. — Reuters