ISLAMABAD, Dec 8: Pakistan has rejected India’s demand to extradite three fugitives and urged it to share evidence proving that elements from this country territory had carried out the recent attacks in Mumbai.

This was communicated to India in a demarche from Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir to Indian High Commissioner Satyabrata Pal in response to India’s second demarche which had listed actions it wanted Pakistan to take.

The response came amid reports from various parts of the country, including the federal capital, that a crackdown had been launched against the outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaatud Dawah. This was one of the main demands made in the Indian demarche of Dec 1.

“India has been told that of the three fugitives, Pakistan doesn’t know the whereabouts of two of them, who are Indian nationals — the infamous Mumbai crime kingpin Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon, while evidence is needed for action against … Maulana Masood Azhar, the head of the now banned Jaish-e-Muhammad and is a Pakistani,” an official said.

The response is believed to have been approved by the Defence Committee of the Cabinet (DCC), which met earlier in the day. The committee had decided to “take actions within the ambit of Pakistan’s law”.

Sources, meanwhile, said that because there was no extradition treaty between India and Pakistan, handing over anyone to India was out of question.

It is believed that the demand for the three fugitives, whose extradition had been sought six years ago, was a tactic meant to put pressure on Pakistan to take action against them in order to prove the sincerity of its proposed cooperation with India in the investigation of the Mumbai terrorist attack.

Pakistan’s demarche noted that it had undertaken its own investigations, but the progress was constrained because of the absence of information sharing between India and Pakistan.

“The (Indian) high commissioner was informed that the government had initiated investigations on its own into the allegations that have surfaced concerning involvement of any individual or entity in Pakistan in the Mumbai attacks,” Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Sadiq said. “To carry forward these investigations, detailed information and evidence is required.”

The Foreign Office reiterated its proposal for a joint investigation.

Both the US and India have said that there were “information and irrefutable evidence” to prove the involvement of elements from Pakistan in the Mumbai attacks, but none of it had so far been shared with Pakistan. Instead, both the US and India insist that Pakistan “knows it all”.

Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir proposed that a high-level delegation from Pakistan “may visit New Delhi as soon as possible as part of Pakistan’s offer for joint investigations”.

The proposed delegation would be comprise FIA officials and personnel of intelligence agencies and diplomats.