Islamabad: Pakistan on Friday contradicted its statements on the Mumbai terror attacks, saying Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone gunman captured during the attacks, didn't take the sea route to the Indian city.
"There is no proof that Kasab took the sea route," Pakistani Navy chief Admiral Noman Bashir said at a press conference in Islamabad.
“The evidence that I have doesn’t show that the terrorists went from this country. This is India's claim from day one. Even before the Mumbai incidents had ended, India was saying that the terrorists have used sea route," he said.
Bashir called the Mumbai attacks a "failure" of the Indian navy and coast guard.
Bashir’s statement contradicts the Pakistan government’s stand. The country’s interior minister had admitted that “part” of the conspiracy to attack Mumbai was hatched in Pakistan and terrorists took the sea route to reach Mumbai.
Pakistan’s Interior Ministry has named three boats used by the terrorists to reach Mumbai and its Federal Investigation Agency has arrested a person who sold engines for the boats.
If there is no evidence that Kasab took the sea route to reach Mumbai, Bashir’s statement doesn’t explain how the Indian navy “failed”.
India says Kasab and nine other Pakistanis had set sail from Karachi, hijacked a trawler after entering Indian waters and finally used a rubber boat to sneak into Mumbai Nov 26, 2008 and embarked on a killing spree that lasted over 60 hours.
Kasab is now in the custody of the Mumbai police, which Wednesday filed a charge sheet naming him and 34 others, all of them operatives of the Lashkar-e-Toiba terror groups, for the Mumbai carnage that claimed the lives of more than 170 people.
Kasab is also one of the eight men named in a case registered by Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency on the Mumbai attacks.
A spokesperson for the Indian Coast Guard denied Bashir's statement and said: Pakistan's latest statement proves it wants to sidestep the 26/11 probe and judicial process."
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