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US, Pakistan hold high-level talks about bomb plot: US
WASHINGTON: Anne Patterson, the US ambassador to Islamabad, consulted Pakistani leaders on Wednesday about the search for leads into the US probe of a car bomb plot in New York, a US official said.Philip Crowley, the State Department spokesman, also said Washington has received a "full and complete pledge" of cooperation from Pakistan for the probe into the botched plot allegedly carried out by a Pakistani-American.
Patterson raised the investigation in meetings with Pakistani Asif Ali Zardari and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi as well as in talks with Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Crowley told reporters.
"She will continue to have other meetings with senior Pakistani officials in the coming days... to work collectively on this ... investigation," Crowley said.
But Crowley was vague about what Patterson and the Pakistani leaders discussed.
"We will be exchanging information as the investigation is ongoing," the spokesman said.
"Whatever leads are generated here in the United States ... we would fully expect Pakistan to follow up on," he said.
"Pakistan, as you are seeing, has already taken its own steps. I'll defer to the Pakistani government to describe what it is doing."
In Islamabad, the Pakistani Army warned that it had yet to establish a link between Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American implicated in the bomb plot, and the country's main militant stronghold in Waziristan.
According to the US criminal complaint, Shahzad admitted "after his arrest that he had received bomb-making training in Waziristan, Pakistan."
The alleged visit to the Al-Qaeda and Taliban stronghold in Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt on the Afghan border presumably occurred during a five-month trip the complaint says Shahzad made to Pakistan.
He returned on February 3 without his wife and told immigration officials that he had been visiting his parents, the complaint said.
Waziristan is the powerbase of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has been the only militant group to claim Saturday's attempted bomb attack, albeit in a move widely disputed in Pakistan and the United States.
Courtesy www.Geo.tv