Nearly a month after the Mumbai terror attacks, India has not provided the evidence needed for Interpol to help identify and apprehend the suspected masterminds, the chief of the global police agency said.
Ronald Noble, speaking in Islamabad on Tuesday after a visit to New Delhi, said Pakistan has agreed to work with the agency to help investigate the attacks that killed 164 people in India’s financial hub last month.
But he said India has provided no names or information that would allow police in other countries to check their databases, calling it “not acceptable” for New Delhi to provide those details to the media first.
India’s reluctance to turn over evidence — while demanding that Pakistan crack down on the militant group suspected of hatching the plot — has been a major irritant to Islamabad.
On Monday, Pakistan sent fighter jets screaming through the skies near major cities in a display of military force that raised concerns the two nuclear powers may go to war for a fourth time.
Seeking to temper tensions, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen made a second visit to Pakistan since the Mumbai attacks and urged the country’s leadership to work with India to fight terrorism.
He “encouraged the Pakistani leaders to use this tragic event as an opportunity to forge more productive ties with India and to seek ways in which both nations can combat the common threat of extremism together,” the US embassy in Islamabad said in a statement.
Meanwhile, police in Kashmir announced the arrest of three men accused of plotting a suicide bomb attack in Indian Kashmir.
One, Ghulam Farid, is a Pakistani soldier, said Kuldeep Khoda, director-general of police in Indian Kashmir.
In Pakistan, a military official said Farid was not an active soldier. He said Farid deserted in June 2006. The official asked not to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.
Confirmation that Farid is an active Pakistani soldier would be a blow for Pakistan, which denies funding and training Kashmiri militant groups and says it only provides them with moral support.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also sought to calm tensions, saying New Delhi does not want to go to war.
“The issue is not war. Nobody wants war,” he told reporters. “The issue is terror — and territory in Pakistan being used to promote and abet terrorism.”
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of soldiers were on patrol in Indian Kashmir yesterday to prevent separatist unrest during the final phase of elections in the disputed Muslim-majority region.
Voter turnout was sparse in Srinagar, the hub of the anti-Indian insurgency, with polls also open in the Hindu town of Jammu and neighboring Samba district.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS