TNN

New Delhi, Jan 30: As Pakistan comes under renewed international pressure to respond credibly to India's demands in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, sources said the old machinery of disinformation in Pakistan is at work to obfuscate the issue.

Officials monitoring events inside Pakistan said these supposedly stray bits of information were also intended to queer the pitch by raising the level of rhetoric again.

For instance, in reports which security sources suspect to have been planted by Pakistani official agencies, Islamabad alleges that captured Mumbai terrorist Ajmal Amir Kasab is actually dead. Some media reports suggest "whether he was killed in custody immediately after the Mumbai attacks or in recent days is yet to be confirmed".

India, they said, has not provided any DNA samples of Kasab or the other nine terrorists, leading to the conclusion that India actually made him up.

On Thursday too, Pakistan claimed to have picked up three "RAW-trained" Pakistani citizens in Punjab for alleged espionage activities on behalf of India. The police in Pakistan claimed these alleged terrorists had crossed the border several times and had confessed to documenting "important assets" of the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which is the prime accused in the Mumbai attacks.

A third line has been "leaks" from Pakistan's interior ministry that the Mumbai attacks were planned outside Pakistan. This would apparently be part of the Pakistani response to the Indian dossier which is expected to be presented to India "soon". Pakistani PM Yousuf Raza Gilani was quoted as saying in Davos that the details of Pakistan's response would be released soon. "If there is anything substantive, we will certainly share (it) with the world," he said.