Dawood in Pak, but why should we help India: Musharraf

A day after Union home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi said that India's most wanted criminal Dawood Ibrahim is in Pakistan, the country's former president and military ruler Pervez Musharraf today virtually acknowledged that the 1993 Mumbai blasts mastermind is in Karachi.

Talking to a Pakistani news channel, Musharraf said, "India has been accusing Pakistan for long. Why should we now become good and assist them? I don't know where Dawood is. He must be here, somewhere. India has been killing Muslims and Dawood Ibrahim has been reacting."

Pakistan has consistently denied that Dawood is ensconced there, while India maintains that he lives in a palatial house in Karachi. Over the last 10 years, New Delhi has sent several dossiers to Islamabad in this regard, naming Ibrahim as the prime accused in the Mumbai serial blasts case.

On Wednesday, the home secretary Mehrishi had said that the government is taking all required action to bring Dawood to triali  India. "Dawood Ibrahim is in Pakistan. That country has given him shelter. That country is also putting hurdles in bringing him back to India to face the law," he told PTI.

The home secretary said the "attitude" of Pakistan was not in conformity with international law and it is working against India in Ibrahim's case. "Whatever action is required, we are taking. We will get him. The process is on. But the attitude of the Pakistan government is not in conformity with the international law.''

Ibrahim is the main accused in the 1993 serial bomb blasts case in Mumbai in which around 260 people were killed and more than 700 were injured. He fled India after the bombings.

In April, Home Minister Rajnath Singh had stated there was no doubt that Ibrahim was still in Pakistan. In 2011,

P Chidambaram, then the home minister in the UPA government, had also said that Ibrahim was based in Karachi.

India had earlier also accused Pakistan of giving shelter to Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden and a team of the United States Navy, SEALs, in a special operation, killed him on May 2, 2011.

Musharraf, when asked about Pakistan's consistent denial about Osama Bin Laden's erstwhile presence in their country, said, "The issue is we have human intelligence. When Osama was killed, nobody knew that he was Osama and was staying there as people thought of him as a drug dealer.''

It may be recalled that al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, then the world's most wanted terrorist, was killed by a team of United States SEALs in an operation on 2 May 2011 in Abbottabad, a garrison city in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province not far from the capital Islamabad.

"Even I have doubt that he was living in Abbotabad continuously for five years," Musharraf said.