NEW DELHI: (AMN) The United States has assured India that it was looking into media reports that FBI had information about David Coleman Headley’s links with terror groups in Pakistan three years before the Mumbai attack in 2008.
In a statement issued in here on Saturday, the US Ambassador to India Timothy Roemer said that US shared terrorism related information promptly with foreign partners if it was potentially credible and relevant to the national security. He also said that the United States takes counter terrorism cooperation with Indian partners very seriously.
“I can say that it is our policy and practice to share terrorism-related information promptly with our foreign partners, when we deem that information potentially credible and relevant to their national security. We do exactly that with partners around the world every day, including India” Roemer said in statement.
He said that since Mumbai terror attack the United States has worked very closely with Indian counterparts to provide them with information relevant both to that attack and the potential future attacks and threats to India’s security. Besides, Indian authorities had also been given access to Headley so that the Indian government could put question directly to him. Roemer’s statement comes in the wake of reports in the ‘Washington Post’ which says that US FBI agents were warned years before the Mumbai attack that an American man was training in Pakistan with the group that carried it out and helped plan the attack.
The report co-authored by journalism foundation ProPublica says that the wife of the Pakistani American Headley had told FBI agents he was an active militant in Lashkar-e-Toiba and trained extensively in Pakistani camps and had shopped for night vision googles and other equipment. The report also says that Headley went to Mumbai five times to scout locations for the terrorist assault on the metropolitan city. The newspaper says the FBI interviewed Headley’s wife three times but he remained free to travel around the world on the scouting missions and was not arrested until almost a year after the Mumbai attack.