Pakistan is preparing to block a lawsuit in a US court that alleges complicity of its spy chief Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha in the audacious 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, on the grounds that it will pour “gasoline on the fire” of Indo-Pak relations.

The country’s military-run ISI has roped in American lawyers, who are moving to quash the lawsuit in a Brooklyn court by arguing that if the case proceeds, it “will fuel violence and extremism” that will threaten Pakistan government and pour “gasoline on the fire” of relations between Pakistan and India, NBC News reported.

The lawsuit, filed last year by relatives of two Jewish victims of the Mumbai attacks, alleges that Pasha and his predecessor Nadeem Taj helped the LeT conduct the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people, including six Americans.

It charges that the ISI provided “critical planning, material support, control and coordination” of the Mumbai attacks under the leadership of Pasha and Taj.

According to a brief filed by lawyers Kevin Walsh and Allen C Wasserman on behalf of the ISI, the Pakistan government “regards any assertion of jurisdiction over its high officials” by a US court “as an intrusion on its sovereignty, in violation of international law”.

The brief argues that Pakistan is a “wartime ally of the United States” in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and that the lawsuit will damage that alliance.

James P Kreindler, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit against ISI on behalf of relatives of the victims of the 26/11 attacks, said recent developments, including the indictment in Chicago of Pakistani-Canadian businessman Tahawwur Hussain Rana and the aftermath of the US raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbotabad hideout, had made his case “many times stronger”.

As a result of those developments, “the Pakistanis have no credibility and they’re playing a double game”, he contended.

The Pakistan government has said it will defend the ISI officials named in the lawsuit.

The court filing comes amid mounting tensions between the US government and Pakistan over suspicions that some elements of the ISI continue to maintain ties to various terrorist groups, including LeT, that are aligned with al-Qaeda.

Those suspicions have been fuelled by the discovery that Laden lived for years in a compound close to the Pakistan Military Academy in Abbottabad, a garrison city that is home to thousands of soldiers.

(Source: DNA India)