India recalls top diplomat over 'Pakistani terror'

Diplomatic relations between India and Pakistan sank to their worst level for 30 years yesterday when India recalled its High Commissioner in Islamabad and announced that it was halting bus and rail links with its neighbour.

India took the moves in protest at what Foreign Ministry officials characterised as Pakistan's failure to act against two Islamist militant groups which India maintains were responsible for a suicide attack on India's parliament building on 13 December in which 14 people died.

A spokeswoman for India's Foreign Ministry, Nirupama Rao, said: "Since the 13 December attack on parliament, we have seen no attempt on the part of Pakistan to take action against the organisations involved. In view of the complete lack of concern on the part of Pakistan and its continued promotion of cross-border terrorism, the government of India has decided to recall its High Commissioner in Islamabad."

Earlier in the week, the Indian Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani described the attack, which was thwarted by security guards, as an attempt to eliminate India's entire political leadership.

Though relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours have rarely been remotely cordial, it is the first time India has withdrawn its top diplomat in Islamabad since the war of 1971 in which Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, gained its independence from West Pakistan.

Last night Pakistan said that it would not follow suit and withdraw its own High Commissioner, but threatened to respond to what it claimed were big Indian troop movements along much of the length of the international border, as well as on the Line of Control, the de facto border between Indian and Pakistani-ruled Kashmir. A spokesman for Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said it would take "appropriate counter-measures" to match the Indian troop movements, "which follow provocative and threatening statements by the Indian leadership". These movements, he went on, "would aggravate an already tense situation".

India has declared that the attack of 13 December was the work of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyba, two of the most prominent Pakistan-based militant groups fighting for the "liberation" of Kashmir, which has a Muslim majority, from Indian rule.

Pakistan has responded to the charges by offering to take part in a joint investigation, an offer India rejected contemptuously. Yesterday India demanded that Pakistan take delivery of the corpses of the five terrorists who died in the attack on parliament, all of whom, India insisted, were Pakistani citizens.