Banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) blamed for the Mumbai attacks rejected Friday a report that one of its leaders had acknowledged the group's involvement. The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed officials, reported Wednesday that Pakistani authorities had obtained a confession from a senior member of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The suspect, Zarar Shah, allegedly told investigators he had played a key role in the planning of the November attacks that left 172 dead. "Lashkar-e-Taiba rejects the Wall Street Journal report," its spokesman Abdullah Ghaznavi said in an email statement.
"India has failed to furnish any evidence of Lashkar-e-Taiba's involvement in the Mumbai attacks and America is now trying to help it out," he said. No evidence could be found "on the scene of the crime, and now there is an effort to manufacture evidence thousands of miles away," he added. Islamabad has also rejected the report.
On Thursday, interior ministry spokesman Shahidullah Baig told AFP: "We have no such information. We don't accept that report." Police arrested Shah and another key Lashkar operative, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, as part of a series of raids against the Islamic charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa, widely seen as the group's political wing. Their arrests came after the United Nations Security Council classified Jamaat-ud-Dawa as a terrorist organisation, obliging UN member states to freeze its assets.
"America was putting pressure on Pakistan's government to manufacture the evidence itself, and then also take action on the basis of this evidence' too, in order to please India," Ghaznavi said.