Pakistan must admit mistakes vis-a-vis 26/11: ex-official

Islamabad, Aug 4: Pakistan must admit its mistakes for allowing Pakistani terrorists to sail to Mumbai in 2008 and carry out a massacre, a retired Pakistani official said in remarks published on Tuesday. "Pakistan has to deal with the Mumbai mayhem, planned and launched from its soil," Tariq Khosa, a former director general of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), wrote in the Dawn newspaper. "This requires facing the truth and admitting mistakes," he said. "The entire state security apparatus must ensure that the perpetrators and masterminds of the ghastly terror attacks are brought to justice." Khosa said the case had lingered on for far too long. He said dilatory tactics by the defendants, frequent change of trial judges and the assassination of the case prosecutor as well as retracting from original testimony by some key witnesses had proved to be serious setbacks for the prosecutors. Ten Pakistani terrorists sneaked into Mumbai from the sea in November 2008 and massacred 166 Indians and foreigners in an attack that almost brought the two countries to war. One of the terrorists, Ajmal Kasab, was caught and later hanged in India. Security forces killed the others. Islamabad initially denied any links with the attackers but later admitted that Kasab and the masterminds were Pakistani nationals. Khosa pointed out that Kasab was a Pakistani and that the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists who attacked Mumbai were trained near Thatta in Sindh and launched by sea from there.