Islamabad pledges action if any Pak group involved
Pakistan’s cabinet was holding crisis talks yesterday to discuss a response to the Mumbai attacks after Islamabad reversed a decision to send the head of military intelligence to India.
Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a press conference Saturday that Pakistan will take action against any group within its borders if it was involved in the Mumbai attacks.
"Any entity or group involved in the ghastly act, the Pakistani government will proceed against it," he told reporters in a televised press conference.
He was briefing reporters after Pakistan’s cabinet held crisis talks about growing tensions over Indian accusations that attackers originated in Pakistan.
Qureshi stressed that no one in India’s government had directly pointed the finger of responsibility for the attacks at Pakistan.
"They are suspecting groups that could have presence here," he said.
"What we have said is if they have information, if they have evidence, they should share it with us."
"We are a responsible nation and a responsible neighbour and we will behave and act responsibly," he said.
The powerful chief of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had been due to fly to Mumbai to help the investigation, amid Indian allegations of Pakistani involvement in the terror attacks that claimed 195 lives.
"The special session of the cabinet will take stock of the situation arising out of the allegations by India and the change in level of ISI participation into the probe," a government official told AFP.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani rushed to Islamabad from the eastern city of Lahore late Friday to chair the special cabinet meeting and his foreign minister cut short a visit to India and returned home by special plane.
The meeting comes after an abrupt change of plan by Islamabad, saying it will send only a representative of the ISI to India, and not its head, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha.
No explanation was given in a short statement issued by the prime minister’s office for the change of plan. The chief was to have gone at the request of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
However, government sources here said the change came after reservations in top military circles over the unprecedented move.
"The military leadership was not consulted before an announcement was made to the media regarding the decision to send the ISI chief to India," a senior government official said.
Before the government U-turn, chief army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas had told AFP that the decision to send the ISI chief had not been conveyed officially to the army.
Singh asked Gilani to send the ISI chief to India in a telephone conversation between the pair Friday, after New Delhi blamed the attack on its neighbour, something which the Pakistani premier has vehemently denied.
Gilani and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari talked to Singh separately and offered to cooperate in the investigation, amid concerns India’s accusations could undo improving relations between the neighbours.
New Delhi has in the past accused Pakistan, and particularly the ISI, of helping militants attack Indian targets, including the Indian embassy in Kabul earlier this year.
A December 2001 attack on India’s parliament in New Delhi, which India also blamed on Pakistan, brought the two countries to the brink of war as the neighbours amassed armies at the border.
Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, was blamed for the 2001 attack and the Indian media has speculated it was also for this week’s assault on Mumbai.
But the group’s spokesman Abdullah Ghaznavi this week denied any involvement in the Mumbai killings and condemned the attacks.
The chief of the United Jihad Council, an umbrella group for over a dozen Kashmiri militant groups, denied any role in the Mumbai attack.
"We very strongly condemn the attacks on innocent civilians in Mumbai and say it categorically that none of the Kashmiri freedom fighting groups has anything to do with it," group leader Syed Salahuddin said in a statement.
The latest Indian allegations surprised Pakistan’s new democratic government, which has repeatedly vowed to work with India to combat terrorism in the region.
Tensions between the rivals have been easing amid a slow-moving peace process aimed at settling their decades-old feud over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which triggered two of their three wars.