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Pakistan Says Ready to Thwart Any "Misadventure" by India
ISLAMABAD, Dec 14 (News Agencies) - Pakistan said Friday that India would pay a heavy price for any "misadventure" after New Delhi accused Pakistan-based armed activist groups of mounting the attack on its parliament.
The Pakistan-based Kashmir group Lashkar-e-Taiba separately denied accusations that it was involved in the attack Thursday, which left 12 people dead, including five attackers.
Pakistani military government spokesman Major General Rashid Qureshi said India would pay a heavy price for any "misadventure" following the attacks.
"India seems to be making efforts to create tension by blaming Pakistan," he said. "India will pay heavily if they engage in any misadventure."
India claimed to have evidence that the five gunmen who stormed the Parliament building on Thursday morning, killing seven people before they were shot dead themselves, were acting through Lashkar.
"India has technical evidence that [Thursday's] terrorist attacks on not just the symbol, but the seat of Indian democracy, and of the sovereignty of the Indian people, was the handiwork of the terrorist organization based in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba," Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh told reporters.
Lashkar spokesman Yahya Mujahid described the accusations as "baseless" and blamed India's own intelligence agencies for orchestrating the attack.
He said the whole incident was a propaganda stunt by India itself.
"The attack on the parliament was a drama staged by Indian intelligence agencies to defame the freedom struggle in the Indian occupied Kashmir," he said.
"It has never been our policy to attack civilian targets. Lashkar and other jihadi organizations are not involved in the recent attack.
"Those [Indians] who can kill thousands of defenseless people in Kashmir can resort to such tactics to gain international sympathy. We demand the international community probe this attack independently to know the truth."
The Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the most hardline Islamic activist outfits fighting to end Indian rule in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state divided between India and Pakistan but claimed by both.
Singh said New Delhi had officially demanded that Islamabad take immediate action against the Lashkar and another hardline group, Jaish-e-Mohammad.
Both organizations have been named among 39 alleged terrorist groups and businesses included on the latest United States Terrorist Exclusion list.
Singh said the activities of both groups must be halted in Pakistan, their leadership arrested and their assets blocked or frozen.
There has been no official response to the request from Pakistani officials here, who said they were yet to be informed by diplomats in New Delhi.
A meeting chaired by President Pervez Musharraf earlier discussed the situation. Pakistan has condemned the attack and Musharraf sent condolences to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Pakistan and India, which became nuclear-armed powers in 1998, have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.
They remain at loggerheads over the state, with India accusing Pakistan of fuelling the Muslim uprising and Pakistan accusing India of "state-sponsored terrorism" against the Kashmiri people.
India has blamed the Lashkar-e-Taiba for previous attacks on high-profile targets, including an armed raid on the historic Red Fort in New Delhi in December last year.
Jaish-e-Mohammad initially claimed responsibility for an attack on the Kashmir state assembly in October this year in which 38 people died, although it later retracted its statement.
They also object to being called terrorist groups, saying theirs is a legitimate struggle for the freedom of the Kashmiri Muslims from Indian rule.
New violence in Kashmir cost twelve more lives when Indian security forces killed a dozen Muslim activists overnight and Friday and seized more than three million rupees ($64,000), the army and police said.
Three of those killed were top members of another Kashmiri armed resistance group, Hizbul Mujahedin, who were shot dead by army and counter-insurgency police during a clash near Patan township, 20 miles north of Srinagar.
An army spokesman said the dead activists included a divisional commander named Nazir Ahmed Yatoo, who "has been a kingpin and chief coordinator of all militant activities in north Kashmir" and headed a list of most-wanted activists.
Some 3.26 million rupees were recovered from the activists' hideout, as well as a large cache of arms and ammunition, and 88 pounds of plastic explosive.
Nine other activists were killed in separate clashes; two belonged to Jaish-e-Mohammad, in one incident, during which nearly a dozen residences and other structures caught fire and were destroyed.
Two Lashkar members were among five killed elsewhere.
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