India will not permit a Pakistani judicial commission to visit again to cross examine the Mumbai terror attack witnesses unless an Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA) team is allowed to go to that country first and determine the necessity of such an exercise.
India wants to send a team of 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 was going on in a court in Rawalipindi, a report in Times of India said on Sunday.
New Delhi also wanted to understand why the Pakistani court was not ready to acknowledge the international convention of accepting a bilateral treaty between two sovereign nations, Indian 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 post-mortem 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.
