London: Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI has been accused of sanctioning and monitoring Indian embassy attack in Kabul. Revelations in new book ‘the wrong enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001-2004’, blames senior officials hand in the 2008 suicide bombing.
The book by NYT journalist Carlotta Gall says the US and Afghan officials intercepted calls from ISI officials where they heard Pakistan’s spy agency plan the attack with militants in Kabul days before the bombing on July 7.
Intelligence officials monitoring the phone calls did not discover the plan, but became clear of high-level ISI operative’s involvement in promoting a terrorist attack, according to the book. The evidence, so compelling the US administration dispatched then CIA deputy chief Stephen Kappes to Islamabad. However, the bomber struck before Kappes reached Pakistan, according to excerpts from the book.
Investigators found the bomber’s cell phone in the wreckage of his explosives-laden car. They tracked down his Afghan collaborator in Kabul, a man who provided logistics for the attack. In the book, to be released next month, Gall writes that the collaborator was in direct contact with Pakistan, and the number he called was that of a high-level ISI official in Peshawar.
The suicide attack killed 58 people, including defence attaché Brigadier Ravi Datt Mehta, Indian Foreign Service officer V. Venkateswara Rao, two Indo-Tibetan Border Police personnel, and injured over 140. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had raised Pakistan’s role in the attack with his then counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani on the sidelines of a SAARC summit in Colombo in August 2008. After initially agreeing to look into India’s concerns, Pakistan later contended there was “no evidence” of ISI’s involvement in the attack.
Gall writes in her book that the bombing of the Indian Embassy was not a “subtle attack needling an old foe” and the plan was to send “a message not just to India but to the 42 countries that were contributing to the NATO-led international force to rebuild Afghanistan”.
Her book has already created a furore in Pakistan after an excerpt carried recently in The New York Times stated that the ISI ran a special desk to handle Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who was killed in a US raid in Abbottabad in May 2011.