"Maulana Masood Azhar is wanted by the government of Pakistan, but he is not in our custody and he is at large," Qureshi told state-run APP news agency.

He said Pakistan has taken "enough steps" to arrest culprits involved in terrorist activities.

Qureshi's remarks came about a week after Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar told a TV channel that Azhar had been detained by Pakistani authorities.

In a demarche issued after the Mumbai terror attacks, India had asked Pakistan to hand over Azhar and underworld dons Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim.

Pakistan has said it intends to take action against all terror suspects according to the country's laws and will not hand them over to India.

Azhar and two other terrorists were freed by India in exchange for the passengers of an Indian Airlines flight that was hijacked from Kathmandu to Kandahar in December 1999.

Azhar formed the Jaish-e-Mohammed soon after his release.

Pakistan's High Commissioner to India Shahid Malik also said that JeM chief Azhar was not under house arrest and his whereabouts were not known to the country's authorities.

"We are looking for him. He is not under house arrest. As far as I know, it (news reports of Azhar's house arrest) is wrong. He is not in Pakistan... We don't know where he is," Malik told Karan Thapar in 'India Tonight' programme of CNBC-TV18.

'KASAB IS NOT A PAK CITIZEN'

Pak High Commissioner Shahid Malik said on Wednesday that Ajmal Kasab is not a Pakistani citizen.

'The News' quoted Malik as saying that Maulana Masood Azhar was also not present in Pakistan. Recently residents of a village in Pakistan Punjab's Okara District have reportedly told a British daily that Ajmal Amir Kasab, the surviving gunman involved in last week's terrorist attacks on Mumbai, hails from there.

According to a report in 'The Observer', electoral lists for Faridkot show 478 registered voters, including the name of Kasab's father Mohammed Amir.

The paper further goes on to say that a villager, who cannot be named for his own protection, said the village was an active recruiting ground for the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"We know that boy [caught in Mumbai] is from Faridkot,'' he said. ''We knew from the first night [of the attack]. They brainwash our youth about jihad, there are people who do it in this village. It is so wrong,'' he added.

According to the villager and other locals, Ajmal has not lived in Faridkot for about four years but would return to see his family once a year and frequently talked of freeing Kashmir from Indian rule.

The truth about Ajmal's origins are key to the ongoing investigation of where the attackers came from and will have a profound impact on relations between India and Pakistan.