Pakistan fury over India's terror claim

In a dramatic accusation which will raise the specter of a new stand-off between two nuclear-armed neighbors, India said on Sept. 30 that Pakistani intelligence was behind the July Mumbai bombings in which at least 186 people were killed. The Mumbai police accused Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency of planning and masterminding the attacks, and said they were carried out by an Islamic militant group based in Pakistan. Islamabad immediately denied the accusation and demanded that India produce some evidence to back it up. "We have solved the July 11 bombings case," the Mumbai police commissioner, A. N. Roy, announced to a press conference. "The whole attack was planned by Pakistan's ISI and carried out by Lashkar-e-Toiba and their operatives in India." "India has always chosen this path of pointing fingers at Pakistan without evidence," Pakistan's Information Minister, Tariq Azim Khan, said. "If they have any evidence, they should provide us evidence and we will carry out our investigations." The sudden accusation will raise fears of a return to the nervous days of 2002, when the two countries came to the brink of war after India blamed Pakistani intelligence for an assault on the parliament in Delhi and a series of attacks that followed. To many observers, it was the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis. The new claim came just hours after Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, defended the ISI in Britain against a leaked Ministry of Defense report which accused the agency of helping the Taliban and al-Qaida. "You'll be brought down to your knees if Pakistan doesn't cooperate with you," Musharraf said in a radio interview. "That is all that I would like to say. Pakistan is the main ally. If we were not with you, you won't manage anything. Let that be clear. And if ISI is not with you, you will fail." On July 11, a series of coordinated bomb blasts went off on commuter trains all over Mumbai at the height of rush hour: The carriages were packed, and the bombs caused many deaths. In the aftermath of the blasts, suspicion fell on Lashkar and on the homegrown Student Islamic Movement of India. On Sept. 30, police said that those two groups had carried out the bombings but it was the ISI which had planned and was ultimately behind them.