By IANS,
New Delhi/Islamabad : Amid reports that Pakistan has rejected India’s dossier holding it complicit in the Mumbai attacks, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee Thursday demanded that Islamabad should honour its deadline and disclose the findings of its internal probe.
“We have not given any deadline. It was Pakistan itself that mentioned a deadline for bringing the probe report to light,” Mukherjee told reporters when asked whether India set a deadline to Pakistan to respond to its dossier on the Mumbai attacks.
“Pakistan should honour the deadline it had given and make it public,” Mukherjee said.
“It is for them to reply.”
According to Pakistani media reports, the probe conducted by the country’s interior ministry has concluded that the Mumbai terror strikes were planned outside its territory. The report that was to be submitted to India by Wednesday is now likely to be shared with India by the end of this month.
Dawn TV quoted sources saying that the Mumbai attack was planned from somewhere outside Pakistan and there are apparently no references to the Lashkar-e-Toiba.
“Certain information that was provided by India and that links Mumbai attacks with Pakistan,” the Pakistani news channel said. “The initial report says that there were no such things, no leads found in Pakistan. The attack was planned outside Pakistan,” the channel reported.
“We are waiting for a formal response,” said an Indian official when asked about Islamabad’s alleged rejection of the Indian dossier that provided information linking Pakistani nationals with the Mumbai attacks.
The report will be made public in “two to three days”, Paksitan’s interior ministry chief Rehman Malik said in Islamabad Thursday.
Malik told Dawn News channel that there was no “specific deadline” for making the report public and the investigators needed more time to complete their investigation. The Pakistan government had on Jan 17 given the investigation team 10 days to submit its preliminary findings.
India would be informed later this week about the outcome of Pakistan’s probe into the Mumbai terror attacks that New Delhi has blamed on elements operating from Pakistan, President Asif Ali Zardari said Tuesday.