“The Deputy High Commissioner of Pakistan was called in the afternoon and handed over a set of responses to the six dossiers received from Pakistan on April 25 on the Mumbai terror attacks,” Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vishnu Prakash said.
The dossier was handed over on Tuesday by Y K Sinha, Joint Secretary in charge of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, to Pakistan’s Deputy High Commissioner Riffat Masood.
“They have given us some more documentation this afternoon and we have sent it to Pakistan,” a Pakistani embassy source in New Delhi said on Friday, asking not to be named. “This is additional information about [the] 26/11 [attacks] and it is huge in volume.”
In Islamabad, foreign ministry spokesperson Abdul Basit confirmed that the new dossier has arrived but said it was a “response to the dossier we had given to India”. Speaking to Express 24/7, Basit said the foreign ministry would examine the new dossier and that the Pakistani government was of the firm opinion that whoever was involved in the Mumbai attacks should be punished. “Pakistan is conducting the trial of the accused on its soil in a transparent and professional way and the recently extended evidence by Indian authorities would be analysed appropriately,” he said.
According to the Press Trust of India (PTI), the dossier, besides containing a response to all the queries raised by Pakistan in their dossiers given in April, also provides additional information on those involved in the Mumbai attacks and evidence that they were operating from Pakistani soil.
PTI reports that the Indian set of responses also conveys India’s ‘mounting unhappiness’ with Pakistan’s lack of ‘concrete action’ against chief of Jamaat-ud-Dawa founder Hafiz Saeed, who India alleges to be the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks.
In the dossiers given in April, Pakistan had asked for three Indian officials, including two magistrates and an investigator, to be allowed to travel to Pakistan to testify that they had recorded the statement of Ajmal Kasab, sentenced to death for the Mumbai attacks.
Pakistan had also asked New Delhi to hand over Kasab, the lone gunman captured alive during the attacks, to facilitate the trial of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s operations commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and six others charged with involvement in the Mumbai attack. Lakhvi and the others are being tried in a Rawalpindi anti-terrorism court.
Meanwhile, a statement from the Indian foreign affairs ministry on Friday said that Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao will visit Pakistan on Thursday, June 24.
“Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao will visit Pakistan at the invitation of the Foreign Secretary of Pakistan Salman Bashir,” the statement said. Rao will also meet Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi. Qureshi has invited his Indian counterpart S M Krishna to Islamabad on July 15.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 19th, 2010.
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