26/11 attacks launched from Pakistan : Former Pak investigator

Backing virtually every claim India made about Pakistan's role in the  26/11 attacks in 2008, Tariq Khosa, former chief of Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) that led the country's probe into the 2008 terror attacks has  called for "facing the truth and admitting mistakes".

In an editorial for the Dawn newspaper,  Khosa supports India's version of how the 10 men who sailed into Mumbai in 2008 before attacking the city's landmarks were guided on the phone by a terror control room in Karachi.

"The ops room in Karachi, from where the operation was directed, was also identified and secured by the investigators. The communications through Voice over Internet Protocol were unearthed," he writes.

Of the 10 terrorists who killed 166 people, Ajmal Kasab alone was caught alive.

Khosa says Kasab , "was a Pakistani national, whose place of residence and initial schooling as well as his joining a banned militant organisation was established by the investigator".

 He says there was also enough evidence to prove that Kasab and the other terrorists were " imparted training near Thatta, Sindh and launched by sea from there... the casings of the explosive devices used in Mumbai were recovered from this training camp and duly matched.

"The case has lingered on for far too long. Dilatory tactics by the defendants, frequent change of trial judges, and assassination of the case prosecutor as well as retracting from original testimony by some key witnesses have been serious setbacks for the prosecutors," Khosa says.

 "Are we as a nation prepared to muster the courage to face uncomfortable truths and combat the demons of militancy that haunt our land? That is the question!" he asks in his editorial.

For long India has been persistent in pointing at a group of men headed by Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, as being instrumental in perpetrating the attacks, saying Lakhvi was the mastermind.

Though Lakhvi was later arrested, India has been objecting to  the  slow trial within Pakistan.

Lakhvi was freed by a local court which granted him bail earlier this year on the ground of insufficient evidence against him.

This created a fresh tension between India and Pakistan.