Zeenews Bureau
Islamabad, Dec 31: The US is exerting tremendous pressure on Pakistan to extradite Mumbai terror attacks’ alleged mastermind Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi to India, reports claimed on Wednesday.
According to the Dawn News channel, Pakistani authorities have been handed over a taped conversation between Lakhvi and the Mumbai attackers by US officials. Washington is pressing for extradition because its audio experts, after analysing the tape, have concluded that it is genuine and that the speaker is Lakhvi.
However, it has yet to be established whether the Americans themselves recorded the conversation or received it from Indian authorities who have held Lakhvi as responsible for the ghastly attacks.
In the first week of December, Indian officials had said in New Delhi that Lakhvi, along with Yusuf Muzammil, had masterminded the Mumbai strikes.
New Delhi says Lakhvi and Muzammil are top leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the Mumbai attacks.
Pakistan on December 8 announced that Lakhvi and some of his top aides had been arrested as suspects, but made it clear that they would be tried only in the country and would not be handed over to India.
However, officials in New Delhi and Washington say that's not enough and they would not be satisfied unless Islamabad followed up by prosecuting those arrested and taking further action against other militant groups linked to attacks on Indian soil.
"Until this week, US officials had not taken a clear stand on this issue but Lakhvi's reported conversation with the gunmen appeared to have changed their minds," Dawn said.
Reports in the US media have also noted that Lakhvi comes from the same area as Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist arrested during the Mumbai attacks.
Officials in Islamabad, however, appeared "reluctant" to accept the intercepts of Lakhvi's alleged conversations as "authentic", Dawn said.
"There, however, appears to be a serious difference of opinion between Islamabad and the Pakistan Embassy in Washington over the issue.”
"While Islamabad was reluctant to accept the evidence as authentic, the embassy insisted that it's authentic and that the Pakistani authorities now needed to take steps to satisfy the international community," the newspaper added.