Pakistan should take Headley’s revelations seriously: India

KABUL/NEW DELHI - India Tuesday said the interrogation of David Coleman Headley, who helped the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) plot the 26/11 Mumbai attack, has revealed clear and growing links between “militants and official establishments” and asked Pakistan to take note of the Pakistani American’s disclosures seriously.

“Whatever Headley has told the FBI has to be taken seriously by all those concerned (Pakistan) and India’s concerns have to be addressed,” Krishna said.

Krishna added Headley’s revelations are in the public domain and they “cannot be brushed under the carpet”.

Krishna’s reminder to Pakistan comes days after his talks with Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi deadlocked on the issue of terror. Subsequently, Qureshi had accused India of selectively focusing on terror to the exclusion of other vital issues like Jammu and Kashmir.

In New Delhi, National Security Adviser (NSA) Shivshankar Menon said the interrogation of Headley, has revealed clear and growing links between “militants and official establishments”.

Menon stressed that the nexus had left no room for India to be optimistic as the link was growing “stronger”.

“It has been brought to us through Headley that there are clear links between militants and official establishments,” Menon said at a conference on terrorism in New Delhi.

“It is that nexus with existing intelligence agencies that makes it a much harder phenomenon for us to deal with and suggest it won’t be broken soon,” Menon stressed.

He pointed out that the information that Indian investigating agencies have and deal with suggest that the link “is getting stronger”.

The interrogation of Headley proved “our worst fears have come true and the situation is as bad as we thought”, Menon said in his brief speech at the conference on ‘Countering terrorism in South Asia: Perspective from US and India’ organised by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and the Heritage Foundation, a US-based think tank.

Pakistan immediately rejected the charges.

Headley, who is in a Chicago jail, was interrogated by Indian investigators, including sleuths from the National Investigation Agency (NIA), last month and disclosed the involvement of not just LeT operatives but the involvement of some serving and retired officers of the Pakistan military and the ISI in the Mumbai carnage.

On the eve of the talks in Islamabad last week, Home Secretary G.K. Pillai had said that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had a “much more significant role” to play in the Mumbai mayhem and that the Pakistani spy agency was “literally controlling and coordinating the attacks from the beginning till the end”.