Pathankot attack: Act now for talks, Pakistan told

New Delhi: Adopting a tough stand, India on Thursday linked the foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan’s “prompt and decisive response” on the “actionable intelligence inputs” that have been provided to it on the terror attack at the Pathankot airbase.

New Delhi’s hardline approach came as highly-placed sources said Indian agencies had shared evidence with Pakistan in the form of details of the call intercepts of the four “handlers” of the Pathankot attack based in that country, who have been identified as Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) head Maulana Masood Azhar, Asfaq Ahmed, Hafiz Abdul Shakur and Kashim Jan.

On the evidence about the Pathankot attack shared with Pakistan, highly-placed sources said the government had got its first evidence to nail Pakistan’s complicity in the Pathankot terror siege in the form of real-time intercepted calls by Indian intelligence agencies, who identified the mastermind as Azhar, along with the three others, as the ones controlling the terrorists during the terror attack.

Sharing details of this evidence with Islamabad, New Delhi has put a condition asking Islamabad for swift and prompt action against the four handlers before the foreign secretary-level talks can be held.

Sources said a dossier of the phone intercepts has been shared by national security adviser Ajit Doval, who spoke to Pakistan’s NSA Lt. Gen. Naseer Khan Janjua (Retd), to convey New Delhi’s stand.

Clearly, JeM chief Masood Azhar, whose release from an Indian jail in exchange for passengers of the Indian Airlines aircraft hijacked to Kandahar in December 1999, has come back to haunt the Narendra Modi government. The JeM was also behind the attack on India’s Parliament in December 2001, and is later said to have masterminded the 2011 attack on the Delhi high court.