ISLAMABAD: Pakistan yesterday angrily rejected US accusations that Islamabad’s main intelligence agency helped plan a deadly bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul last month.
The New York Times yesterday said US government officials had concluded that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) plotted the bombing. Citing unnamed officials, the Times said intercepted communications had provided clear evidence that the ISI was involved in the July 7 suicide attack on the Indian mission, which killed 54 people, including an Indian defense attaché.
“It’s rubbish. We totally deny it,” Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Sadiq said. “This is a baseless allegation that the New York Times keeps on recycling using anonymous sources. These stories always die afterward because there is no proof,” Sadiq said, speaking by telephone from a regional summit in Sri Lanka.
India and Afghanistan have already accused ISI, which backed the hard-line 1996-2001 Taleban regime, of masterminding the embassy bombing. “The Indians are absolutely convinced it’s true, and they’re right,” an unnamed US official told the Wall Street Journal. US government officials would not say specifically what kind of assistance the ISI officers provided to the militants. They told the Times that the ISI officers had not been renegades, indicating that their actions might have been authorized by superiors.
“It confirmed some suspicions that I think were widely held,” one State Department official with knowledge of Afghan issues said of the intercepted communications. “It was sort of this ‘aha’ moment. There was a sense that there was finally direct proof,” the Times quoted the official as saying. American officials say they believe that the embassy attack was probably carried out by members of a network led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose alliance with Al-Qaeda and its affiliates has allowed the terrorist network to rebuild in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
