Pakistan lie machine: Give more proof

Pakistan on Monday asked India to give more information on the Mumbai attacks before it can actually act against the terrorists involved.

“We have gone through the report and want some more evidence. At our end, we are trying to get hold of the suspects,” a Pakistan Cabinet member who attended the meeting of the defence committee of the Cabinet in Islamabad, told this newspaper.

Union home minister P. Chidambaram on Monday rubbished the Pakistani stand that the 26/11 plot was hatched in Bangladesh and Europe, our special correspondent reports from Mumbai. Speaking to mediapersons after a high-level security review meeting at the state guesthouse Sahyadri, Mr Chidambaram, when asked about the Bangladesh angle, simply said, “That is rubbish. The FBI helped us a lot in the investigation of the case and, if needed, they will be called to provide evidence as well.”

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Kandahar was rush job

India might have taken too hasty a decision in the Kandahar hijack case in December 1999 and freed the three dreaded terrorists to secure the release of 161 passengers and crew on Flight IC-814. Intelligence sources have said that Indian officials had ideally wanted to continue the negotiations with the Kandahar hijackers and gain the upper hand, but in a bid to meet a certain deadline and save itself from international scrutiny the then NDA government decided to end negotiations with the hijackers and give in to their demand. Intelligence officials also say that then Union home minister L.K. Advani was unhappy with the decision to release the terrorists in exchange for the IC-814 passengers.

Speaking to this newspaper, former Intelligence Bureau special director Ajit Kumar Doval, who was in Kandahar from December 26 to December 31, 1999, when then external affairs minister Jaswant Singh reached there to work out a deal with the hijackers, said that when in a span of just six days the "number of prisoners (whose release the hijackers were demanding) was brought down from 36 to three by the government", there was the "possibility of hundred per cent success if negotiations were continued" and international pressure built up simultaneously on the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which had been providing "ground support" to the hijackers.

"However, there was a constraint of time, and public pressure was building up. Hence a final decision had to be taken by the government," said Mr Doval. These revelations hold significance in the context of the continuing Congress-BJP sparring over the 1999 incident, particularly since Mr L.K. Advani claimed during the release of his autobiography My Country, My Life that he was not aware of Mr Jaswant Singh's trip to Kandahar with the three released terrorists to bring the IC-814 passengers home.

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