(CNSNews.com) – Despite its pledge to the United States to cooperate fully, Pakistan is refusing to hand over Muslim fugitives whom India has linked to last week’s assault in Mumbai.
 
A spokesman for Hafiz Saeed, an Islamic leader at the top of India’s suspect list, told CNSNews.com on Thursday that the accusations against Saeed were unwarranted.
 
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari said Wednesday that if there was any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the men named by India, they would be tried in Pakistan. Speaking to CNN, he also said the surviving Mumbai gunman was Pakistani, as India claims.
 
India on Monday handed Pakistan a list of 20 suspects, topped by three most-wanted fugitives, including Saeed, the founder and ideologue of Lashkar e-Toiba (LeT), the Pakistani Sunni group, which India accuses of masterminding the Mumbai attacks.
 
According to Indian police, the captured terrorist said the operation was planned on and launched from Pakistani territory, and that Saeed had met with members of the assault team towards the end of the preparations, saying they were blessed to be martyrs.
 
Pakistan banned LeT in 2002, but security agencies say it continues to operate under the name of its pre-existing parent organization, Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), an Islamic charity and education group. The U.S. Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control designates both JuD and LeT as terrorist groups.  Saeed was listed in his individual capacity on May 27 of this year.
 
Seeking to reduce tensions between two countries that are both important to the U.S., Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice headed to Islamabad Thursday after visiting New Delhi a day earlier. In India she reiterated that Washington expected Pakistan to cooperate with the investigation into the Mumbai attacks.
 
“The Pakistani government has said unequivocally that it intends to cooperate,” she told reporters. “And President Zardari has told me that he will follow the leads wherever they go.”
 
Asked what she thought Pakistan’s response to India’s handover request should be, Rice demurred.
 
“I think we should – I should refrain from speculation about what the Pakistani government might do in response to specific requests … I don’t want to get into the specifics of what Pakistan may or may not do. But I’m going to take, as a firm commitment, Pakistan’s stated commitment to get to the bottom of this.”
 
Later, in a joint press conference with her Indian counterpart, Pranab Mukherjee, Rice alluded to Zardari’s reference to the terrorists as “non-state actors.”
 
“The fact is that non-state actors sometimes operate within the confines of a state, on the territory of a state,” she said. “And when that is the case, then there has to be very direct and tough action against them.”
 
Mukherjee earlier did not rule out a military response against those suspected of perpetrating the attacks.
 
Speaking alongside Rice Wednesday, he said only that the Indian government was “determined to act decisively to protect India’s territorial integrity and the security of its people.”
 
He said he had told Rice that “there is no doubt that the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were perpetrated by individuals who came from Pakistan and whose controllers are in Pakistan.”

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen visited Islamabad on Wednesday, meeting with Zardari and senior military officers. He urged Pakistan to “investigate aggressively any and all possible ties [linking the Mumbai attacks] to groups based in Pakistan,” the U.S. Embassy said in statement.
 
“While noting recent success by Pakistan’s Armed Forces against extremists in the border regions [adjoining Afghanistan], Adm. Mullen also encouraged Pakistani leaders to take more – and more concerted – action against militant extremists elsewhere in the country,” it said.
 
‘Everyone supported Kashmiri freedom fighters’
 
More than 170 people were killed in India’s commercial capital last week. Officials have yet to provide a final, definitive death toll, but six Americans were among several dozen foreign victims.
 
In Mumbai, an estimated 10,000 people joined a protest to express anger about alleged Pakistani links to the attacks as well as security failures by the Indian authorities.
 
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since the two attained independence from Britain in 1947. Muslim Pakistan was carved out of predominantly Hindu India – which has a huge Muslim minority – and two of the three wars were fought over Kashmir, a mostly Muslim territory claimed by both, and divided between them.
 
LeT, formed in the early 1990s, is one of several militant groups established with the goal of expelling India from Kashmir, allegedly with the backing of the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate. Delhi has blamed the group for numerous attacks in Indian-controlled Kashmir as well as elsewhere in India.
 
On Thursday, a spokesman for Saeed and JuD denied that Saeed was the founder of LeT or that the two organizations were linked.
 
Abdullah Muntazir said JuD, which was set up in 1985, had like many other groups in past years supported “Kashmiri freedom fighters.”
 
“It was not illegal in Pakistan till 2002 to actively support Kashmiri freedom fighters,” he said.
 
Muntazir named several other religious and political organizations that had also done so, and compared that backing for the Kashmiri militants to the earlier support – from the U.S. among others – for Islamist mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
 
“So you can say [supporting the Kashmir groups] was a general phenomena at that time,” he said. “Once the government of Pakistan declared it illegal there was no association [between JuD and LeT] after that.”
 
Muntazir reiterated that JuD distanced itself from the Mumbai attacks and “from all kinds of attacks committed against civilians and public places.”
 
Asked who he thought was responsible, Muntazir said he would not emulate the Indian government and media by laying blame while investigations were still underway.
 
But he said there were questions to be raised, including why an early casualty was the head of India’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which had been leading investigations into still-unsolved bombings in India allegedly linked to Hindu extremists.
 
“What will be the future of investigation going on in India against Hindu terrorists?” Muntazir said. “Who is the most beneficiary of these attacks?”
 
A number of conspiracy theories circulating in Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere in recent days hold variously that right-wing Hindus, Indian military intelligence or “Zionists” were behind the Mumbai attacks. Among those sought out and killed by the terrorists were an Israeli-born rabbi, his wife, and four other Jews killed at a Chabad-Lubavitch center.