India for the first time directly accused Pakistan’s military intelligence agency of involvement in last November’s Mumbai attacks, amid reports Islamabad’s own probe will suggest the assault was planned in Bangladesh.
In a speech in Paris reported by the Indian media on Friday, Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon said the perpetrators “planned, trained and launched their attacks from Pakistan, and the organizers were and remain clients and creations of the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence].”
The stunning November assault on India’s financial capital, when 10 gunmen killed 165 people during a 60-hour siege, has led to a furious blame game that has sharply escalated tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors.
PHOTO: AFP
Last month, India handed Islamabad a dossier of what it said was evidence linking “elements” in Pakistan to the attack.
India has blamed the assault on the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is active in Indian-ruled Kashmir, but the Pakistan-based organization has denied responsibility.
Islamabad on Friday furiously rejected Menon’s allegations as “part of a global smear campaign.”
“Pakistan rejects the allegations as these are far from reality and patently mala fide [in bad faith],” foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said.
“It was yet another manifestation of undisguised hostility and [a] global smear campaign being conducted by India against Pakistan,” Basit said.
Pakistan has confirmed that the lone surviving Mumbai gunman, who is now in Indian custody, is one of its citizens, but it insists that the attackers were “non-state actors.”
India had previously blamed the ISI for a suicide attack on its embassy in Kabul last July, in which 60 people, including India’s military attache and a diplomat, were killed.
Menon said India had long suffered from “terrorist organizations, their support structures, official sponsors and funding mechanisms, which transcend national borders but operate within them.”
He also criticized foreign arms sales to Pakistan in the name of fighting terrorism, saying it was like selling “whisky to an alcoholic.”
The US has been one of Pakistan’s key military backers, including providing F-16 fighter jets in return for political support for its operations in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s oldest English-language newspaper, Dawn, reported that investigators probing the Mumbai attacks for the government in Islamabad had uncovered evidence implicating a banned Bangladesh-based militant organization, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islmani (HUJI).
The report, based on unidentified sources, also mentioned the possibility that one of the gunmen was of Bangladeshi origin.
The probe “is likely to indicate that the Mumbai attack was the handiwork of an ‘international network of Muslim fundamentalists’ present in South Asia and spread all the way to Middle East,” Dawn said.
“Although the Bangladesh connection has emerged quite prominently in the investigations, there are also clear indications that some of the planning for the attacks was done in Dubai and there is also an element of local Indian support,” it said.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said on Friday the results of Islamabad’s own investigation into the attacks would be made public next week.
HUJI has been blamed by authorities for a series of attacks in Bangladesh and also accused of responsibility over a series of synchronized bomb blasts across the northeast Indian state of Assam in November in which nearly 80 people were killed.
The group’s chief Mufti Abdul Hannan was sentenced to death late last year after he was found guilty of masterminding an attack on the British ambassador to Bangladesh in 2003.
Bangladesh said on Friday it was unaware of any evidence implicating HUJI in the Mumbai assault.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not