Asserting that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is a terrorist network supported and nurtured by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan, a top American lawmaker warned that Islamabad would have to bear the responsibility of any terrorist attack on the US coming from LeT.
"We should make it clear to Pakistan that any LeT attack upon our homeland, they will bear responsibility for that because of their close relationship between ISI and LeT," Congressman Peter King said during a Congressional hearing yesterday.
Designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States and the United Nations, LeT, King alleged is a proxy of Pakistani intelligence.
"I think it's important to note that. The LeT is a terror proxy of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, its ISI, which provides LeT with a safe haven and funding to train and prepare for terrorist attacks," he said.
King, the Republican lawmaker from New York, is Chairman of the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee.
"While focused on Pakistan's dispute over Kashmir, an issue over which it regularly kills innocent Indian civilians, LeT's reach is broad and goes abroad. In addition to the 2009 plot in Denmark, LeT supported a planned 2002 attack on Australia by means of a trainer sent from France," he said.
LeT's networks span across South Asia and the Persian Gulf into Europe, especially Britain, as well as Canada and New Zealand, King added.
"LeT actively recruits Westerners, maintains social media sites in colloquial American English and has since the 1990s sustained support cells here in the United States. LeT members were arrested in the homeland as recently as 2011 when Jubair Ahmad was arrested in Woodbridge, Virginia.
"Eleven LeT members previously have been arrested in Virginia back in 2003. Suspected LeT operatives are reported to have surveilled several identified potential terror targets in this country," he said.
"LeT practices good communication security and is proficient at surveillance skills, making it a difficult target for our intelligence collection efforts, which should be immediately increase on this target. LeT maintains ties with al-Qaida.
"They fight together against us in Afghan provinces of Ghazni, Kunar and Nuristan. LeT terrorists earlier fought our forces in Iraq. When our special operators raiders Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, they reportedly recovered correspondence between the late al-Qaida leader and the LeT leader, Hafiz Saeed," King said.
