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No evidence to link Pak in hijack: Clinton

C K Arora in Washington

President Bill Clinton has said that the United States has no reason to believe that the Pakistan Government might have been involved in the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane last month.

''No we do not, no. I guess the simplest thing I can tell you is that we do not have evidence that the Pakistani government was in any way involved in that hijacking; we don't,'' Clinton said at a press conference in Washington on Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, theNew York Times, in its lead story, quoted ''Clinton administration officials'' saying that ''the United States now believes that a terrorist group supported by the Pakistan military was responsible for the hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet last month, a judgement that puts Pakistan at risk of being placed on Washington's list of nations that support terrorism.

But President Clinton said that Washington did not believe that Pakistan was culpable in the incident.

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart went further: ''We have no evidence that the Government of Pakistan had foreknowledge of, supported or helped carry out the hijacking.''

State Department spokesman James Rubin said that Pakistan supported groups known as Kashmiri nationalists. ''We have long said that the government of Pakistan does provide general support to a number of groups operating in Kashmir, including the Harkat ul-Mujahideen,'' he added.

Harkat-ul-Mujahideen is the new name for Harkat-ul-Ansar, a radical Kashmiri nationalist group that was put on the State Department's list of terrorist group in 1997. Later, it changed its name.

A State Department official, who did not want to be identified said: ''We do have reason to believe that the Harkat ul-Mujahideen was involved in the hijacking.''

He also said that ''there are agencies of the Government of Pakistan which have provided general support to a number of groups which have been active in Kashmir and that includes Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.''

A spokesman for Pakistan's embassy here said Islamabad denied any link to hijacking. ''The government of Pakistan denounced the suggestion that it had anything to do with the hijacking, much less that it supported any organisation that had anything to do with the hijacking,'' the spokesman said.

UNI

Complete coverage of hijack crisis

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