Samjhauta blasts probe moving at snail’s pace: Pakistan
By IANSFriday, January 14, 2011
ISLAMABAD - Pakistan has accused India of moving at “snail’s pace” in probing the 2007 Samjhauta Express train bombing, and said it hoped New Delhi will share details of the investigaton with Islamabad “at the earliest”.
“We hope India will share details of their investigations with Pakistan at the earliest, as was conveyed to them formally two days ago,” Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit was quoted as saying by the Express Tribune.
The remarks come two days after the Indian government has turned down Pakistan’s demand to share the investigations into the terrorist attack blamed on Hindu radical groups.
The February 2007 blasts targetting the Pakistan-India Friendship train service killed 68 people, including 42 Pakistani nationals.
“It is now almost four years to the blast. The Indian investigation is clearly moving at a snail’s pace, to put it mildly,” Basit told reporters Monday.
Pakistan has also summoned an Indian diplomat Monday to insist on sharing the probe details after arrested Swami Aseemanand’s reported confession about the role of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) activists in the blasts that hit the Samjhauta Express.
The Indian home ministry refused Pakistan’s demand, saying “the investigation is still on and is at a preliminary stage”. It said the government will take an appropriate decision when the investigations are concluded.
Aseemanand, whose real name is Jatin Chatterjee, 59, has been associated with the RSS-affiliated Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad in Gujarat. He has confessed before a magistrate that Hindutva activists were involved in the Samjhauta strike and the 2007 bombing at the Ajmer shrine in which three people died.
He also confessed before the magistrate that the 2008 Malegaon bombings that killed 37 people and the Hyderabad Mecca Masjid bombing in May 2007 were the handiwork of the Hindu extremists linked to the RSS.
Indian investigators had earlier blamed the terror acts on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jihadi Islami (HuJI) and many Indian Muslim youth were arrested for the bombings.
