Indian Govt ‘Very Pleased’ with Cooperation in Headley Case: US

The US has said that Indian government would have been ‘very pleased’ with the cooperation Washington offered in giving Indian investigators access to Lashkar operative David Coleman Headley but the country’s media seemed disappointed with the ‘delay’ in the process, said media reports.

“In the Headley case, I know the people in the press have been – particularly in India – a bit frustrated by the delay,” Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake was quoted as saying while answering a query at a State Department blog forum.

He said that Indian government, however, did share media’s opinion and is in fact satisfied with the cooperation, reports said.

“I think the Indian government would say that they’ve been very pleased with the cooperation that they’ve had with us,” he was quoted as saying.

Recently, some reports in media had said that the Indo-US Strategic Dialogue was overshadowed by the issue of access to Headley which took a long time.

“Obviously, we had to work through Mr Headley’s lawyers and so there was a great deal of work that had to be done to ensure that there could be a productive discussion, and that’s now taken place,” Blake was quoted as saying.

He said that counter-terrorism cooperation between the US and India has really been one of the new strengths of the relationship and has increased quite dramatically since the terrible Mumbai attacks in November of 2008, said reports.

“Since then, we’ve seen quite close intelligence and also law enforcement cooperation. We have a new counter-terrorism cooperation initiative,” he was quoted as saying.

Blake said that the two countries are looking at new cooperation in the areas of cyber-security, which would benefit both, reports said.

(Based on internet reports)