US Ambassador Call Indian Evidence in Mumbai Terror Case "Credible"

One looks in vain in this article for precisely which parts are credible.

The most damning bit of their evidence is that Pakistan officials must have known of the coming Mumbai massacre:

India confronted Pakistan on Monday with a detailed dossier that it said showed that "elements from Pakistan" were behind the November terrorist assault on Mumbai and said it was inconceivable that no one in the Pakistani government knew of the plans.

India's moves added pressure to the already tense relationship between the nuclear-armed rivals over the assault, in which some 170 people died.

The evidence handed to Islamabad included the lengthy confession extracted during the interrogation of Ajmal Kasab, the only gunman caught during the attack. McClatchy reported Dec. 6 that Kasab had come from Faridkot, a village in Pakistan's Punjab province.

Also in the dossier were telephone intercepts between the assailants and their alleged handlers in Pakistan, data retrieved from recovered GPS and satellite phones and details of "recovered weapons and equipment," India's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

...

Shiv Shankar Menon, India's foreign secretary, the top bureaucrat in the Foreign Ministry, said it "beggars the imagination" that no one within the Pakistani state knew about the preparations for the attack, an accusation that appeared directed at the Pakistani army and its intelligence agencies.

Note that that, however, isn't positive evidence per se, but circumstantial evidence. The first-cited article does not mention that belief specifically, but the outgoing US ambassador seems full of implication:

He sought to counter the perception that Americans, critically dependent on Pakistan for the success of their fight against Taliban, will not lean hard on Pakistan. "Americans have different ways of skinning a cat," he said in a remark that could be seen as a reference to the American efforts to open parallel logistic routes to Afghanistan through Russia and Central Asia as well as the belief that they continue to have leverage on important state actors in Pakistan.

If the evidence is "credible," the implications from that evidence are credible as well.

Thanks to Guarav.

posted by Ace at 11:37 AM

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