‘India should be pleased with US cooperation in Headley case’

WASHINGTON - Hinting that a key Mumbai terror attack plotter, Pakistani American David Headley, may be cooperating with Indian investigators, the US says India would have been very pleased with the US cooperation in the case.

“I know the people in the press have been - particularly in India have been a bit frustrated by the delay” in providing Indian investigators access to the Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, who has confessed to his role in the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, US assistant secretary of state for South Asia Robert Blake said Tuesday.

“But as National Security Advisor James Jones confirmed over the weekend, an Indian team has gotten access to Headley now,” he said in an online conversation with Teresita Schaffer, Director of the South Asia Programme at Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank.

“And I think the Indian government would say that they’ve been very pleased with the cooperation that they’ve had with us,” Blake said.

“Obviously, we had to work through Headley’s lawyers and so there was a great deal of work that had to be done to ensure that there could be a productive discussion, and that’s now taken place,” he said why Indian access to Headley had been delayed for so long.

A four-member team from India National Investigation Agency (NIA) which has been in Chicago for over a week was allowed to question Headley after External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna made a public plea for access to the most wanted terrorist in India during the India-US strategic dialogue.

Blake said counterterrorism cooperation between the US and India “has really been one of the new strengths of our relationship and has increased quite dramatically since the terrible Mumbai attacks”.

In fact, he suggested Headley case was symptomatic of the cooperation to meet the growing threat from anti-Indian groups like LeT, blamed for the Mumbai attacks, not only to India but the US too.

“But more broadly, I would say that the Headley case really is symptomatic of a larger issue in Indo-US relations and indeed India-Pakistan relations, which is the growing scope of groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and their ambition to conduct attacks not just against India but in places like the United States, possibly against our troops in Afghanistan.”

“And it underlines the importance of us all working together to address that threat, and also for Pakistan to take action against LeT,” Blake said.

“We think that this is something that really is in Pakistan’s own interest to do because of what the Secretary (of State Hillary Clinton) has termed kind of the syndicate that is operating now in Pakistan.”

“So we’ve seen welcome progress by Pakistan in Swat, in South Waziristan. We hope that there can now be progress on this very important issue, which would have very consequential implications for India-Pakistan relations,” he said.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)