A day after Pakistan made a renewed attempt to put the onus of action on India by demanding “deactivation” of forward airbases to “send a positive signal”, fresh evidence emerged of the role of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the use of Pakistani soil in last month’s terror attacks on Mumbai.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) revealed that senior Lashkar commander and the outfit’s communications chief Zarar Shah has told his Pakistani interrogators that he had been one of the key planners of the attacks, and had been in touch with the terrorists by phone as the 60-hour gun-battle raged.

And the Karachi-based Dawn reported from Washington that the US had given a tape to Pakistan containing conversations between Lashkar’s operations chief Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi and the terrorists. Pakistan is now under “tremendous pressure from the United States to extradite to Lakhvi to India,” the Dawn report said.

“Diplomatic sources in Washington said that American audio experts had checked the tape and concluded that it was genuine and that the speaker was Lakhvi,” Dawn said, adding it was, however, “not yet clear if the Americans recorded the conversation using their own surveillance methods or received the tape from the Indians”.

Dawn also revealed that there “appears to be a serious difference of opinion between Islamabad and the Pakistan Embassy in Washington” over how to react to the tape. “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 report said.

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