By IANS,
Islamabad: Six days after India provided additional information on the involvement of Jamaat-ud Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Saeed in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, Pakistan Thursday said this was inadequate.
At the same time, it expressed confidence that the upcoming meetings between the foreign secretaries and foreign ministers of the two countries would lead to progress for resumption of the composite dialogue process that India had frozen in the wake of the Mumbai mayhem.
“It needs to be underlined that the dossiers and information received from India on Saeed are not really enough to proceed legally,” Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit said at his weekly briefing here.
“We are proceeding (against Saeed) in accordance with our own laws,” he added.
India Saturday provided Pakistan an additional seven-page dossier of evidence relating to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and underlined that it has given Islamabad enough proof to prosecute Saeed.
Addressing a press conference in New Delhi, Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram said Saturday: “There is enough evidence to proceed against Saeed.”
“The evidence provided in three dossiers is, in our view, sufficient to investigate role of Hafiz Saeed (in the Mumbai carnage),” the minister said, adding: “The investigations in Pakistan will also throw up enough evidence.”
Saeed, who had been placed under house arrest in December after the UN proscribed the JuD in the wake of the Nov 26-29, 2008, Mumbai terror attacks, was released by the Lahore High Court in June citing lack of evidence.
On July 28, a defiant Pakistan said it would not arrest Saeed till adequate proof was provided of his involvement in the Mumbai carnage.
“We cannot arrest him till adequate proof is provided. There is no proof,” Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik told a private TV news channel in an interview.
The statement came 12 days after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said July 16 his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani had informed him that “common consensus” was being evolved and that “action will have to be taken against him (Saeed)”.
Two days before that, on July 14, Pakistan’s Punjab provincial government had dissociated itself from the case against Saeed, saying the federal government had not furnished “solid evidence” to warrant his continued house arrest.
Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone gunman captured alive during the Mumbai mayhem, has admitted to being a Pakistani national and to being trained for the Mumbai attacks by the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terror group that Saeed had founded. The LeT had morphed into the JuD in the wake of the Dec 13, 2001 attack on the Indian parliament that New Delhi has blamed on the outfit.
Pakistan has charged five men, including LeT commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, with involvement in the Mumbai mayhem.
Last month, Pakistan handed over a dossier to India admitting its nationals were involved in the attacks. The dossier came days before the July 16 Gilani-Manmohan Singh meeting on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Summit at the Egyptian resort of Sharam el-Shaikh.
Speaking to reporters after the two-hour-long meeting, Manmohan Singh said he had raised the matter of Pakistan taking action against Saeed.
“The Pakistan prime minister told me that there is common consensus being evolved that action will have to be taken against him. The Punjab government, which is of the opposition party, is being persuaded,” he said.