ISLAMABAD/NEW DELHI: Pakistan put its forces on high alert after someone pretending to be India’s foreign minister made a phone call to President Asif Ali Zardari threatening war after the Mumbai attacks began, Dawn newspaper said yesterday.
“It’s true,” a diplomat with knowledge of the exchanges told Reuters when asked whether the report was correct. Dawn said the Nov. 28 caller threatened military action unless Pakistan acted immediately against the perpetrators of the slaughter in Mumbai, launched two days earlier.
For the next 24 hours Pakistan’s Air Force was put on “highest alert” as the military watched anxiously for any sign of Indian aggression, the report said. Tensions have been running high since India blamed militants based in Pakistan for the three-day rampage in its financial capital.
Dawn said the caller, posing as Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, also tried to telephone US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but due to specific checks by US officials the call was not put through.
According to Dawn, Rice called Mukherjee in the middle of the night to ask why he had adopted such a threatening tone, but he assured her that he had not spoken to Zardari. Mukherjee said his discussions with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who was in New Delhi that day, had been cordial.
There were frantic phone calls between Washington, Islamabad and New Delhi to cool the temperature and by the evening of Nov. 29, calm had been restored. Dawn said Zardari’s staff had bypassed usual verification checks for a call for the president, but the government said Zardari received the call after it was properly verified that it originated from India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
“It is not possible for any call to come through to the president without multiple caller identity verifications,” Information Minister Sherry Rehman said in a statement. “In fact the identity of this particular call, as evident from the CLI (caller’s line identification) device, showed that the call was placed from a verified official Phone Number of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.”
India, meanwhile, said that police had arrested two men who helped the Mumbai attackers get mobile phone cards that they used for communications during the attacks.
Police in the eastern city of Kolkata identified the men as Tausif Rehman and Mukhtar Ahmed and said they were picked up yesterday after investigators traced some of the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards recovered from the gunmen.
But there was a quick rebuttal from another state that one of the two men arrested is a counter-insurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission.
A senior police official in Indian Kashmir said one of them, Ahmed, is part of a semiofficial counter-insurgency network whose members are usually former Kashmiri militants. Kolkata police have been told Ahmed is “our man and it’s now up to them how to facilitate his release,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information. They demanded his quick release. The Kolkata police denied that. “This is not true,” said Rajeev Kumar, a top police official.
