ISI orchestrated Indian embassy attack in Kabul: Report

WASHINGTON - Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) orchestrated the suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in 2008 and paid the Taliban to kill Indian contractors in Afghanistan, secret US documents released by the website Wikileaks revealed.

The Guardian newspaper, one of the three media outlets which was given access to the 92,201 secret US military documents to review their authenticity before their online release Sunday, said that in July 2008, the deputy head of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, flew to Islamabad to confront the ISI with evidence that the agency orchestrated the suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul.

It said citing the secret documents that the CIA had intercepted phone conversations between ISI officers and the militants who carried out the attack.

The British and US governments have repeatedly urged Pakistan to root out the Taliban from their sanctuary inside the border, with little effect, it said.

One report from November 2007 said the ISI was plotting an attack on the Indian consulate in Jalalabad; another, titled “ISI order murder and kidnappings”, has the agency offering between $15,000 and $30,000 for the assassination of Indian road workers.

At least 54 people, including the Indian defence attache, were killed in the suicide bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul July 7, 2008.

Called “The War Logs”, the 92,201 secret US military documents spanning six years of the war in Afghanistan present the military’s own raw data on the war, including numbers killed, casualties, threat reports and the like.

Three major media outlets, the New York Times, London’s Guardian newspaper and the German weekly Der Spiegel, were given access to the logs several weeks ago to review and verify their authenticity before their online release Sunday.