New Delhi: India is unlikely to permit a Pakistani judicial commission to visit here again to cross examine the Mumbai terror attack witnesses unless an NIA team is allowed to go to that country first and determines the necessity of such an exercise. India wants to send a team of National Investigation Agency (NIA) to Pakistan to examine the material evidence collected against arrested 26/11 terror attack prime accused including LeT commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and six others against whom the trial is going on in a court in Rawalipindi.
New Delhi also wants to understand why the Pakistani court was not ready to acknowledge the international convention of accepting a bilateral treaty between two sovereign nations, Home Ministry officials said. The eight-member Pakistani judicial commission had visited India following a bilateral agreement which said the commission would not quiz the magistrate, who had recorded the statement of Kasab, the Investigating Officer of the case and two doctors who conducted the postmortem of slain terrorists.
However, after the Pakistani court dealing with the 26/11 case had said that evidence collected by the commission during its first visit to India in March had no "evidential value" to punish those involved in the Mumbai terror attack, Islamabad had asked New Delhi to allow its panel to visit Mumbai again.
The Pakistani judicial commission, which had included prosecutors and defence lawyers, visited Mumbai in March. "Unless the NIA team is allowed to visit Pakistan and understand the necessity of the second visit of the Pakistani judicial commission to India, it is difficult for us to say anything now," an official said on the possibility of allowing the second visit of the Pakistani judicial commission to India.
When Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde had met his Pakistani counterpart Rehman Malik on the sidelines of the SAARC ministerial meeting in Maldives last month, he conveyed India's desire to send the NIA team to Pakistan.
Comments
0 comment