New Delhi, Jul 5, (DHNS): Mumbai carnage mastermind Abu Jundal’s revelations cast shadow over ongoing Indo-Pak secretary-level talks
Even as foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan started talks on Wednesday, New Delhi drove home the point that in the light of revelations made by recently arrested Lashkar-e-Tayyiba operative Abu Jundal, it was impossible for Islamabad to deny its state agencies’ support to the 26/11 plotters and perpetrators.
“It is no longer possible to deny that though the incident happened in Mumbai, there was a control room in Pakistan before and during the incident. Without state support, the control room could not have been established,” said Home Minister P Chidambaram. He was replying to journalists’ queries on the implications of Abu Jundal’s revelations about the role of Pakistani ‘state actors’ in planning and carrying out the November 26, 2008 attacks in Mumbai. His comment came less than three hours after Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai and his Pakistani counterpart Jalil Abbas Jilani started their two-day talks on peace and security, including confidence building measures (or CBMs), disputes over Jammu and Kashmir and promotion of friendly exchanges.
Mathai is understood to have shared with Jilani the details of the Pakistani passport that Jundal alias Zabiuddin Ansari used to travel to Saudi Arabia after the 26/11 attacks. He also briefed Jilani about the information Jundal provided to his interrogators about the Pakistani state agencies’ role in plotting the carnage in Mumbai.
The home minister made the remark a day after External Affairs Minister S M Krishna said that while India wanted Pakistan to do more to curb terror emanating from the latter’s territory, the “issue of progress on terrorism had not held the dialogue process to ransom”. Talking to journalists onboard his special aircraft while returning from a visit to Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe on Tuesday, Krishna quoted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying that Pakistan was a neighbour and India would have to live with its neighbour.
While remarks of Krishna on Tuesday were ostensibly intended to set right the atmosphere between India and Pakistan, Chidambaram’s statement on Wednesday appeared to be reflection of more hawkish views within the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance on New Delhi’s engagements with Islamabad.
“After Abu Jundal’s interrogation, it is clear that there were (Pakistani) state actors (who helped plot the attacks in Mumbai). Dots are increasingly getting joined. Though there were many pseudonyms, it is clear that state actors were there. Pictures are getting clearer and clearer. We have been able to know who were there and where they were,” said the home minister.
Jundal, who was born and raised at Beed in Maharashtra, was in the control room that the LeT set up at Karachi in Pakistan to coordinate the November 26, 2008 attacks in Mumbai. He was directly communicating with the 10 terrorists, who carried out the carnage, killing at least 174 and injuring countless others. Though he shifted base to Saudi Arabia after the 26/11 attacks, tacit cooperation between New Delhi and Riyadh recently landed him in the custody of law-enforcing agencies in India.
The home minister’s tough talk on the Pakistani state actors’ role in 26/11 just on the day two countries’ foreign secretaries started their parleys appeared to be a rerun of the July 2010 botched dialogue between Krishna and his then counterpart in Islamabad, Shah Mahmood Qureshi. A day before Krishna’s visit to Islamabad for talks with Qureshi, the then Home Secretary G K Pillai had told reporters that the direct role of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence in 26/11 had been confirmed by the revelations made by incarcerated LeT operative David Coleman Headley to the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the US.
After the failure of his talks with Qureshi, Krishna had expressed displeasure over the timing of the remark made by Pillai. Officials said that the dialogues was progressing as scheduled.