- NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A man
arrested over the bloody raid on India's parliament said on Thursday
Pakistan's
army and top intelligence agency had armed the suicide squad and they had
telephoned their families in Pakistan the night before they died.
-
- Mohammad Afzal, arrested in India's troubled Jammu and
Kashmir state after the attack, told Star Television the squad was in
constant
contact with the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed as they scouted out the
Indian capital for potential targets, including foreign embassies.
-
- It is not clear why he was allowed to give an interview
to the privately owned Star, as well as several other journalists.
-
- India blames the attack on the Jaish-e-Mohammed and
another
Kashmiri separatist group, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, backed by Pakistan's top
intelligence agency. Pakistan denies involvement. "The Pakistani army
provides them (with) weapons ... the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence
agency)
provides the rest," Afzal said in the Star interview. "They give
them logistical support and weapons -- who else will give them?
-
- "They (the suicide squad) were in regular touch
with the Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistan."
-
- The unprecedented attack on the heart of the world's
largest democracy killed 14 people, including the five assailants who India
says were all Pakistani.
-
- "They took all sorts of help from me. I am the
person
who brought them here. I provided all kinds of facilities to them,"
Afzal said, adding they also spoke to their families on the eve of the
December 13 attack.
-
- "They spoke of general chit-chat... did not tell
them where they are... but that they had to do some big work and if they
were successful then they would return home," he said.
-
- "But that was just to convince, console them. One's
mother was crying on the phone and he was telling her -- 'don't cry, don't
cry'... for consolation."
-
- In another television interview, he said the leader of
the suicide squad had told him he was involved in the 1999 hijacking of
an Indian passenger jet from Nepal. That incident ended only after India
freed some pro-Pakistan militants it was holding.
-
- Afzal is one of eight Indians arrested after the
parliamentary
raid, most of them in Kashmir.
-
- India on Thursday rejected a U.S. request to share its
evidence with Pakistan so President Pervez Musharraf could crack down on
militants in his country fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, the predominantly
Hindu country's only Muslim-majority state.
-
- India accuses Pakistan of sponsoring the roughly one
dozen Kashmiri separatist groups. Pakistan denies this, but says it
provides
moral support for what it calls "freedom fighters".
-
- With India considering military strikes against the
militants,
the war of words over responsibility for the parliamentary attack threatens
to deteriorate into a wider conflict between the nuclear rivals,
undermining
regional stability.
-
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