India has 'clear evidence' of Pak involvement in hijacking

NEW DELHI, Jan 3: India has clear evidence Pakistan was involved in the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814, National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra said Sunday, reports AFP.

"We have clear evidence to prove Pakistan's involvement... the Pakistani establishment is certainly responsible for this. That is what I am saying," Mishra told the private Star TV network.

"The behaviour of Pakistan from the first day when it said that India had stage-managed the hijacking and that an Indian intelligence agent with a particular seat number was travelling in the aircraft showed Pakistan's intentions," Mishra said.

"We have the names of all the hijackers who are Pakistani nationals and the list of militants they wanted to be released contained (a) majority of Pakistani nationals," he said.

"All evidence and intercepts we have suggest this. One such intercept showed that one militant outfit in Kashmir asked another in the state why it condemned the hijacking.

"The other replied that we got instructions from Pakistan. (The) Pakistani establishment is definitely responsible for it."

A spokesman for Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's BJP party earlier said Pakistan must "prove its innocence" by handing over the hijackers of the plane and the released militants to India.

"If Pakistan is really innocent as it pretends to be, let it hand over the hijackers along with the militants back to India and prove its innocence," spokesman Venkaiah Naidu said.

The five masked Muslim militants were last seen on Friday at Kandahar airport, Afghanistan, as they left the Indian Airlines jet they seized on December 24.

The eight-day hijack ended Friday with all 160 passengers and crew released in exchange for three pro-Kashmiri Muslim militants jailed in India.

Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said Saturday that intelligence reports suggested the hijackers and the released militants were on their way to Quetta, capital of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

He said India considered Pakistan to have played a significant role in the hijacking, as initial inquiries revealed the hijackers were Pakistani, as were the majority of the terrorists whose release they sought.

Pakistan, which has fought three wars with India, has strongly denied they had entered its territory.

Pakistani Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider told reporters in Islamabad that if the militants entered Pakistan they would be arrested and dealt with in accordance with international rules.

The freed militants included Masood Azhar, a Pakistani cleric, Mushtaq Ahmad Zargar, a Muslim militant who once held sway in Srinagar, and Ahmed Umar Syed Sheikh, a British passport holder involved in kidnappings.

The Indian government has been harshly criticised for bowing to the hijackers' demands.

Naidu rejected opposition criticism of the government's handling of the crisis and accused them of "playing politics."

"The government had tackled it in an appropriate manner and it had no other option but to act in the way it did... Such critics are only playing politics," he said.

"This should be an eye-opener to all of us... There is a need for a joint effort by the international community to deal with such crimes," Naidu was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India.

He defended the government's decision to release the militants saying that in the past here were "numerous" similar incidents.

But senior police officers in troubled Kashmir warned that the hijackers' escape would only fuel terrorism in the Himalayan state.