India rejected Friday a claim by Pakistan's naval chief that the lone surviving alleged gunmen in the Mumbai attacks did not enter India from Pakistani waters. The naval chief Noman Bashir said that Pakistan had “no evidence whatsoever that (the gunman) Ajmal Kasab had gone to India from Pakistani territorial waters.” “The Indian navy is much larger than ours and if Ajmal Kasab had gone from here then what were their coastguards doing and why they did not stop the terrorists?” said the naval commander. Bashir declined to make further comment “There are many questions about the Mumbai attacks which need to be answered and until then we cannot make any comment,” he said. But Pakistan was engaging in “multiple speak, duplicity and denial” and had “created this confusion”, India's junior foreign minister Anand Sharma told reporters in New Delhi. India blamed the attacks, which killed 165 people last November, on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the siege soured a five-year peace process between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. Sharma said Pakistan had earlier acknowledged that Mohammed Ajmal Amir Iman - also known as Kasab - and nine other gunmen had arrived in India by sea and that Pakistan was speaking “in different voices”. Indian police have charged Pakistani national Kasab with murder and “waging war against India”. Kasab was the only alleged member of the 10-man commando-style unit captured alive during the Nov. 26-29 siege. Pakistani foreign office spokesman Abdul Basit said in Islamabad on Thursday investigators from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were due to visit Pakistan on March 4 to help probe the Mumbai attacks. FBI director Robert Mueller will head the team, which Basit hoped would “assist Pakistani officials by providing further intelligence information”. Both LeT and Pakistan have denied any involvement in the attacks but the government in Islamabad admitted this month for the first time that the strikes were partly planned on its soil.
