After Pune blast, India wants access to Headley

Does not rule out the involvement of Pak-based JuD.

The involvement of Pakistan-based Jamaat-ul-Dawah (JuD) behind Saturday’s terror attack in Pune was not ruled out by the government tonight, days after the front of terror group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) spoke of the western city being a target.

As investigators pieced together clues to unravel the identity of those behind last night’s attack on German Bakery, the possibility of execution of terror plans by LeT at the places visited by Pakistani-American David Headley, a terror suspect currently in US custody in connection with November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, is also being looked into.

After visiting the site of the attack in which nine persons were killed, Home Minister P Chidambaram renewed the demand for access to Headley. Pune was one of the places Headley had surveyed.

No arrests have been made in the attack in which officials said the deadly RDX and ammonium nitrate were suspected to have been used. Two foreigners — an Italian woman and an Iranian male student — were among those killed in the first strike since the Mumbai carnage on November 26, 2008.

“Seeing that just recently the JuD had made the statement saying that Pune is a fair target, we will have to link one and the other and then think that some of these agencies in Pakistan are behind the (Pune) blast,” Home Secretary G K Pillai told a TV channel tonight.

A high-level meeting convened by Chidambaram analysed the speech made by JuD leader Hafiz Abdur Rahman Makki at the Kashmir Solidarity Day conference in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir on February 4 in which he had mentioned about attacks on Indian cities including Pune. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reviewed the situation with Chidambaram in New Delhi and directed the Centre and the Maharashtra government to take coordinated and effective action to speedily investigate the matter. Earlier, the home minister visited the site of the attack after which he dismissed any “intelligence failure” and said the terrorists had hit a “soft target”.