Pakistan distances itself from ISI agent, says he is Canadian

NEW DELHI: Hours before Tahawwur Rana 's arrival, Pakistan washed its hands off him saying he had ceased to be Pakistani and was a Canadian.

Distancing itself from Rana, whom the ISI protected till the end, Pakistan govt's foreign office issued a statement Thursday saying they had no connection to him. "He is a Canadian national and as per our record, he has not renewed his Pakistani documents for over two decades," its spokesperson Shafqat Ali Khan said at a briefing.

The strenuous distancing is significant because the involvement of Pakistan's spy agency ISI was established by Indian agencies with the help of the confession of Ajmal Kasab , the lone Lashkar terrorist involved in the carnage to have been apprehended alive, and findings of the investigation conducted with help from foreign partners; especially the FBI.

Rana, born in Pakistan in 1961, served in the Pakistan Army Medical Corps before moving to Canada in the 1990s, where he obtained citizenship. Sources in the intelligence establishment have consistently maintained that this was a routine move by the ISI to 'settle' their assets abroad to facilitate their India-centric operations.

Denial has been the default first response of Pakistan govt which faced international opprobrium after the mass slaughter of innocents carried out by its assets, and which further steeled its already-formidable notoriety as the hub of jihadi terror. It had denied Kasab was a Pakistani citizen, going to the extent of identifying him as an Indian national - something which could have helped its effort to pass off the Mumbai attack as a case of homegrown terror. Kasab and others were carrying forged IDs which showed them as Hindus. As part of the camouflage, they had tied saffron strings ('kalevas') they had found on the fishing trawlerthey had commandeered.

Kasab's alias was that of a Bengaluru resident, Samir Dinesh Chaudhari. The gameplan came to naught because of the expose that confirmed his identity as a Pakistani national born to Amir Kasab and Noor Illahi - both Pakistan citizens. Then Pakistani PM Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani subsequently sacked his adviser on national security Mahmud Ali Durrani for his "irresponsible behaviour".