Pakistan blames India for bombing near Hafiz Sayeed house

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan accused India on Tuesday of the 2021 bombing near the Lahore residence of LeT founder Hafiz Sayeed, in which three people were killed and 22 injured and claimed New Delhi’s footprints had been found in most of the terrorist activities in the country.

Addressing a press conference, Pakistan interior (home) minister Rana Sanaullah said Islamabad has decided to bring its stance before the world and “unveil” India’s alleged “face of terrorism”.

The minister, flanked by Punjab’s top counter-terrorism department (CTD) official, Imran Mehmood, said the presser was called to share evidence of last year’s attack near the residence of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba founder Hafiz Saeed. The CTD official said police had traced the suspect within 16 hours of the incident on June 23, 2021. “And within 24 hours we arrested three terrorists. The first character was Peter Paul David, who was caught through the details of his vehicle. Sajjad Hussain, who was arrested alongside, was David’s assistant,” he said.

“He (Peter) was affiliated directly with two RAW agents — Ali Budaish and Bablu Srivastava,” the CTD official alleged, adding his assistant had destroyed the phones used for communications to plan the explosion.

On Peter’s identification, Mehmood said, Ziaullah, another terrorist, was arrested. “This guy (Ziaullah) was the brother of the main culprit – Sami-ul-Haq. Four to five days later CTD officials tracked down two more culprits – Eid Gul and his wife, Ayesha Gul,” Mehmood said,

After Gul’s interrogation, the CTD was finally able to arrest Sami-ul-Haq, the main handler of the attack, along with his brother-in-law, Uzair Akbar. Akbar, Mehmood claimed, assisted Haq in terror activities. “We also found out about Naveed Akhtar, who did the surveillance and selected the target,” the official said.

“Naveed was a labourer in the Middle East and was in jail because he could not pay his fine,” Mehmood said. He alleged that a RAW agent approached Naveed and told him that he would pay his fine but Naveed would then have to carry out terrorist activities against Pakistan. He added that as soon as Naveed was arrested, several terror activities were thwarted

Mehmood alleged that “close to a million dollars of terror financing” was done by India to “spread terrorism in Pakistan”, adding that all those arrested have been sentenced to death three times by the courts.