Indian official accuses Pakistan spy agency in Mumbai attack

A senior Indian official has accused Pakistan’s powerful spy agency of planning and carrying out the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, the toughest and most direct allegation by the Indian government against its neighbor over the assault that killed 166 people.

The allegation of Inter-Services Intelligence agency involvement, published Wednesday in the Indian Express newspaper, comes a day before the foreign ministers of the nuclear-armed rivals are scheduled to meet in Islamabad in a bid to ease suspicion stemming from the attack.

Home Secretary G.K. Pillai’s accusation appeared aimed at pressuring Pakistan to prosecute some of the suspects New Delhi believes were involved in the attack. But the timing doesn’t bode well for an early easing of tensions between the two wary South Asian powers.

“It was not just a peripheral role,” Pillai was quoted as saying. “They [the ISI] were literally controlling and coordinating it from the beginning till the end.”

The ISI has long been suspected of supporting and even helping to create Islamic militant groups as part of its clandestine war against India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

India has submitted several dossiers on the attack to Pakistan, hoping that Islamabad will prosecute some of the Pakistani nationals suspected of involvement. Pakistan has responded as many times that the information is insufficient.

Indian officials and analysts have long claimed a significant role by ISI-linked militant groups in the attack. However, Pillai’s accusation suggests his government has received more conclusive evidence of the spy agency’s involvement from its interrogation of David Coleman Headley.

Headley, an American of Pakistani descent, was arrested in Chicago last year after allegedly helping plan and carry out reconnaissance for the attack in Mumbai, formerly Bombay. In what has been touted as a strong example of growing U.S.-India intelligence sharing, Washington in May agreed to let Indian investigators question Headley in the U.S.

In his comments, Pillai also accused Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, a founder of the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, of a role in the November 2008 attack on a rail terminal, two hotels and a Jewish center in Mumbai. Saeed now heads the legal Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity, seen by the U.S. as a Lashkar front. The group denies any role in the Mumbai attack.

“He knew everything,” Pillai said of Saeed.

Indian analysts said Pillai’s contention that the ISI was deeply involved in the Mumbai attack is credible.

“This is likely, from what we’ve seen of the telephone intercepts as well as the intelligence verification in India,” said Dipankar Banerjee, director of New Delhi’s Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies.

Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna will meet with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Thursday, ostensibly to build mutual confidence. Krishna said on arriving in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, that he plans on raising issues related to the Headley interrogation.

Pillai’s comments on the eve of the talks “don’t reduce the importance of a dialogue,” Banerjee said. “But they make the [positive] outcome of a dialogue very difficult.”

mark.magnier@latimes.com