US says undecided on India's access to Headley
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NEW DELHI , MAR 23 - The US has not yet decided whether to give India direct access to a man in custody who identified targets for the Mumbai 2008 attacks, the US ambassador in New Delhi said Tuesday.
India has been clamouring for access to David Headley since he was arrested in Chicago in October and a refusal would likely strain relations and embarrass the government, which announced at the weekend that it had secured a deal.
US Ambassador to India Timothy J. Roemer said the US was "committed to full information sharing in our counter-terror partnership" and had provided "substantial information" to India.
"However, no decision made on direct access for India to David Headley has been made," Roemer said.
Headley last week pleaded guilty to 12 charges of conspiring in the Mumbai terror attacks and has agreed to cooperate with US investigators. In return for his guilty plea, he is set to avoid the death penalty and extradition to India.
The Headley case has infuriated some in India where a number of commentators have highlighted how New Delhi agreed to give US investigators access to the man accused of being the only surviving gunman from the Mumbai attacks.
A team of Indian investigators travelled to the US after Headley's arrest but were denied direct access and India has been seeking it since.
Writing at the weekend, a number of commentators revived suggestions that Headley was a US agent who had "gone rogue."
In 1998 he was convicted of smuggling heroin but avoided a long jail sentence by cooperating with the authorities before working for the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Pakistan, according to the New York Times.
Vir Sanghvi, a commentator in the Hindustan Times, urged readers on Sunday to imagine the furious reaction if India had refused the US access to a suspect in the September 11 atrocities in Washington and New York.
"For us, 26/11 (the Mumbai attacks) is as important as 9/11 is to the Americans," he wrote.
The Washington-born son of a former Pakistani diplomat and American woman, Headley spent two years surveying Mumbai ahead of the November 2008 attacks by 10 Islamist gunmen that left 166 people dead.
Posted on: 2010-03-23 12:00
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