Pakistan’s High Commissioner to India, Abdul Basit, on Friday avoided a clear comment on former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s claim that his country had nurtured the Kashmiri terrorist outfit Lashar-e-Toiba.
Downplaying the statement, he said Pakistan was itself a big victim of terrorism, especially since the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.
Mr. Basit said, “It serves no purpose for us [to train terrorists]. All militant organisations have been proscribed, and Pakistan is committed not to allow its territory for terrorism anywhere in the world. Rather than being stuck in the past, let us look ahead.”
Mr.Basit, on a four-day visit to the city since Wednesday, addressed a news conference at the Press Club of Bangalore in the afternoon before meeting Governor Vajubhai Vala.
An interview published in a Pakistani publication on Wednesday reported Gen. Musharraf as claiming that his country had supported and trained groups like the LeT in the 1990s to carry out militancy in Kashmir.
Countering a question on that, and also the continued provocations and killings by Pakistani forces from across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, Mr. Basit said, “We also have evidence of your troops doing the same 400 times so far in which about 40 of our people have died.”
Instead of accusing each other, he said it was better that the two neighbours formalised the near-accord towards peace that the then heads of government had conceived in 2003, about stopping firings at the LoC.
