Author: PTI
Publication: Rediff.com
Date: December 31, 2008
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/dec/31mumterror-lashkar-commander-zarar-shah-confesses-involvement-in-mumbai-attacks.htm
Top Lashkar-e-Tayiba commander Zarar Shah
captured in the crackdown on militants earlier this month in Pakistani-occupied
Kashmir, has confessed the group's involvement in the terror attacks in Mumbai,
a media report said on Wednesday.
Shah has also implicated other LeT members, and had broadly confirmed the
confession made by the sole captured militant Ajmal Kasab to Indian investigators--that
the 10 assailants trained in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and then went by boat
from Karachi to Mumbai, the Wall Street Journal reported quoting a senior
Pakistani security official.
The paper said Pakistan's own investigationof terror attacks in Mumbai had
begun to show substantive links between the LeT and 10 gunmen who took part
in the Mumbai mission.
Pakistani security officials were quoted as saying that a top Lashkar commander,
Zarar Shah, has admitted a role
in the Mumbai attack during interrogation. The paper quoted a person familiar
with investigation as saying that Shah also admitted that the attackers spent
at least a few weeks in Karachi, training in urban combat to hone skills they
would use in their assault.
The disclosure, it said, could add new international pressure on Pakistan
to accept that the attacks, which left 183 dead in India, originated within
its borders and to prosecute or extradite the suspects.
That raises difficult and potentially destabilising issues for the country's
new civilian government, its military
and the spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence--which is conducting interrogations
of militants it once cultivated as partners, the Journal said.
"He is singing," the security official
said of Shah.
The admission, the official told the paper, is backed up by US intercepts
of a phone call between Shah and one of
the attackers at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, the site of a 60-hour
confrontation with Indian security forces.
A second person familiar with the investigation was quoted by the Journal
as saying that Shah told Pakistani
interrogators that he was one of the key planners of the operation, and that
he spoke with the attackers during the
rampage to give them advice and keep them focused.
Shah, the paper said, was picked up along with fellow Lashkar commander Zakiur
Rehman Lakhvi during the military camp raids in PoK.
The probe, the Journal said, also is stress-testing an uncomfortable shift
under way at Pakistan's spy agency -- and
the government -- since the election of civilian leadership replacing the
military-led regime earlier this year.
Military and intelligence officials, it says, acknowledge they have long seen
India as their primary enemy and Islamist extremists such as Lashkar as allies.
But now the ISI is in the midst of being revamped, and its ranks purged of
those seen as too soft on Islamic militants.
That revamp and the Mumbai attacks are in turn putting pressure on the civilian
leadership, which risks a backlash
among the population -- and among elements of ISI and the military -- if it
is too accommodating to India.
"Don't fight the ISI. It can make or break any regime in Pakistan,"
retired General Mirza Aslam Beg, a former army chief, was quoted as saying.
The delicate politics of the Mumbai investigation, the Journal said, have
given the spy agency renewed sway just when the government was trying to limit
its influence. A Western diplomat told the paper that the question now is
what Pakistan will do with the evidence it is developing.
The big fear in the West and India is a repeat
of what happened after a 2001 attack on India's parliament, which led to the
ban on Lashkar.
Top militant leaders were arrested only to
be released months later, the Journal noted. Lashkar and other groups
continued to operate openly, even though formal ISI links were scaled back
or closed, the diplomat was quoted as saying.
"They've got the guys. They have the confessions. What do they do now?"
the diplomat said. "We need to see that this is more than a show. We
want to see the entire infrastructure of terror dismantled. There needs to
be real prosecutions this time."
A spokesman for Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Farhatullah Babar, was
quoted as saying on Tuesday that he wasn't aware of the Pakistani investigation
yet producing any links between Lashkar militants and the Mumbai attacks.
"The Interior Ministry has already stated that the government of Pakistan
has not been furnished with any evidence," he said.
The Pakistani security official, it said, cautioned that the investigation
is still in early stages and a "more full picture" could emerge
once India decides to share more information.
Pakistani authorities didn't have evidence that LeT was involved in the attacks
before the militants' arrest in
PoK, the security official claimed. They were captured based only on initial
guidance from US and British authorities.
