Kurukshetra War - Kali Yuga ping...
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Posted on 12/31/2008 3:47:54 AM PST by MyTwoCopperCoins
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is under "tremendous pressure" from the US to extradite Lashkar-e-Taiba operations commander Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi, the alleged mastermind of the Mumbai terror attacks, to India, a media report said on Wednesday.
The Americans are believed to have given Pakistan a taped conversation Lakhvi allegedly had with gunmen involved in attacks on Mumbai on November 26.
American audio experts had checked the tape and concluded it was genuine and that the speaker was Lakhvi, the Dawn newspaper quoted US and diplomatic sources as saying.
Though Indian officials had been saying for some time that Lakhvi should be handed over to India, US officials had not taken a clear stand on this issue until this week. Lakhvi's conversation with the gunmen appeared to have changed their minds, the report said.
Diplomatic sources in Washington told the newspaper that the Americans were now "urging Pakistan to hand over Lakhvi to New Delhi".
Lakhvi was detained along with over 20 other LeT and Jamaat-ud-Dawa activists during a crackdown by Pakistani security forces near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan occupied Kashmir, on December 7.
Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has confirmed that Lakhvi was among those detained but his current whereabouts are not known.
Pakistan has so far said it will not hand over to India any of its nationals found to be linked to the Mumbai attacks. It has also said that such individuals will be tried under Pakistani laws.
Reports in the US media have said that Lakhvi came from the same area in Pakistan as Ajmal Amir Iman alias Ajmal Kasab, the lone gunman arrested in Mumbai out of the 10 terrorists who killed over 180 people.
The Dawn reported that officials in Islamabad appeared reluctant to accept the intercepts of Lakhvi's conversation provided to them by American and British intelligence agencies as authentic.
The intercepts include Lakhvi's cellphone conversations with gunmen holed up inside Mumbai's Taj Hotel during the 60-hour siege.
Officials in Pakistan said Kasab's confession and other evidence were inadmissible in court. They said that since the confessions had been "obtained under severe pressure" by the Indians, this could not be admissible in any judicial process. They have insisted that the information provided will not stand scrutiny in court, the report said.
There is also a "serious difference of opinion between Islamabad and the Pakistan embassy in Washington over the issue", the report added. While Islamabad is "reluctant to accept the evidence as authentic, the embassy insisted that it is authentic and that the Pakistani authorities now needed to take steps to satisfy the international community", it said.
It was not yet clear if the US recorded the conversations between Lakhvi and the terrorists in Mumbai using their own surveillance methods or received the tape from India, which has accused Lakhvi of masterminding the attacks.
On December 4, Indian officials told journalists in Delhi that they believed Lakhvi and Lashkar operative Yusuf Muzammil had masterminded the Mumbai attacks.
Officials in New Delhi and Washington have said they would not be satisfied unless Islamabad followed up by prosecuting those arrested and taking further action against other militant groups linked to attacks on Indian soil.
Lashkar leader, Zarar Shah, confesses role in Mumbai attack: Report
31 Dec 2008, 1346 hrs IST, PTI
NEW YORK: Top Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Zarar Shah captured in the crackdown on militants earlier this month in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir has
confessed the group’s involvement in terror attacks in Mumbai, a media report said on Wednesday.
Shah has also implicated other LeT members, and had broadly confirmed the confession made by the sole captured terrorist Ajmal Kasab to Indian investigators — that the 10 assailants trained in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and then went by boat from Karachi to Mumbai, the Wall Street Journal reported quoting a senior Pakistani security official.
Pakistani security officials were quoted as saying that a top Lashkar commander, Zarar Shah, has admitted a role in the Mumbai attack during interrogation.
The paper said Pakistan’s own investigation of the terror attacks in Mumbai have begun to show substantive links between the Lashkar and 10 gunmen who took part in the Mumbai mission.
The paper quoted a person familiar with investigation as saying that Shah also admitted that the attackers spent at least a few weeks in Karachi, training in urban combat to hone skills they would use in their assault.
“He is singing,” the security official said of Shah. The admission, the official told the paper, is backed by US intercepts of a phone call between Shah and one of the attackers at the Taj hotel, the site of a 60-hour siege.
The disclosure, it said, could add new international pressure on Pakistan to accept that the attacks, which left over 180 dead in Mumbai, originated within its borders and to prosecute or extradite the suspects.
A second person familiar with the investigation was quoted by the Journal as saying that Shah told Pakistani interrogators that he was one of the key planners of the operation, and that he spoke with the attackers during the siege to give them advice and keep them focused.
Shah, the paper said, was picked up along with fellow Lashkar commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi during the military camp raids in PoK.
The probe, the Journal said, also is stress-testing an uncomfortable shift under way at Pakistan’s spy agency ISI and the government since the election of civilian leadership replacing the military-led regime earlier this year.
Military and intelligence officials, the report says, acknowledge they have long seen India as their primary enemy and Islamist extremists such as Lashkar as allies.
But now the ISI is in the midst of being revamped, and its ranks purged of those seen as too soft on Islamic militants.
That revamp and the Mumbai attacks are in turn putting pressure on the civilian leadership, which risks a backlash among the population — and among elements of ISI and the military — if it is too accommodating to India.
“The ISI can make or break any regime in Pakistan,” retired Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, a former army chief, was quoted as saying. “Don’t fight the ISI.”
The delicate politics of the Mumbai investigation, the Journal said, have given the spy agency renewed sway just when the government was trying to limit its influence. A Western diplomat told the paper that the question now is what Pakistan will do with the evidence it is developing.
Kurukshetra War - Kali Yuga ping...
To be added to or removed from this ping list, please FReepmail Sir Francis Dashwood.
The Pak government was in this up to their eyeballs.
Maybe if a few Pak Army Divisions are reduced to pink mist they'll get with the program.
L
It is pretty pathetic, huh? Long past time for India to payback the Mughal @$$holes. Way long time.
Hey there, Paki’s ...
You can’t hide!
We charge you with Hinducide!
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