India 'must share attacks evidence'

Pakistan has called on India to share evidence from the Mumbai attacks, warning that any effort to prosecute key suspects rounded up in Pakistan will be hamstrung without it.

Pakistan says it needs India to share evidence from the Mumbai attacks investigation Pakistan says it needs India to share evidence from the Mumbai attacks investigation

India says Pakistan must dismantle the militant group blamed for last month's attack, which left 173 dead, including nine gunmen, and raised tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.

Pakistan, under pressure from the US to avoid a crisis that would divert Islamabad from battling the Taliban and al Qaida on its Afghan frontier, has arrested two alleged masterminds of the assault.

On Thursday, it clamped down on an Islamic charity after the UN branded it a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the powerful Pakistan-based guerrilla group blamed for the Mumbai attacks.

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said that Pakistan firmly believed that its territory should not be used to commit any act of terrorism. "However, our own investigations cannot proceed beyond a certain point without provision of credible information and evidence pertaining to Mumbai attacks," Qureshi said in a televised statement.

Indian authorities have released what they said were the names and Pakistani hometowns of the 10 gunmen who assailed India's commercial capital over three days. Having interrogated the lone gunman captured alive, Indian investigators allege that the gunmen were trained in camps in Pakistan.

Pakistan complains that its own investigation has had to rely on Indian news reports due to the lack of information coming from authorities.

The US says Lashkar, which grew out of the 1980s resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, has developed ties to al Qaida. India accuses it of involvement in a string of terrorist attacks on its territory and alleges that Pakistani intelligence continues to back it - a charge vehemently denied in Islamabad.

However, Lashkar's main focus has been fighting Indian troops in Kashmir, the Himalayan region divided between Pakistan and India since independence from Britain in 1947 and the source of two of their three wars.

Islamic charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa says it cut its ties with Lashkar when the latter was banned by then-President Pervez Musharraf in 2002. But the UN on Wednesday said Jamaat-ud-Dawa was no more than a front. The next day, Pakistani authorities put the charity's leader, Lashkar founder Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, under house arrest, sealed its offices around the country and ordered banks to freeze its assets.

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