PAKISTAN’S FORMER HIGH COMMISSIONER IN COLOMBO SAYS IT WAS
INDIA’S RAW THAT TRIED TO ASSASINATE HIM IN SRI LANKA

By Walter Jayawardhana

Pakistan’s former ambassador in Colombo who escaped an assassination attempt in the heart of Colombo has accused India’s spy agency the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) which is run directly under Indian Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh of organizing the attack on his life.

The attack that occurred few weeks ago as the work of RAW was reported first , immediately after the attack by a Pakistan newspaper called the News but easily forgotten since there was no direct revelation by the victim and the denial of the Sri Lanka government who thought it was purely an act of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

The ambassador, Retired Col. Bashir Wali Mohamed who is officially known as the High Commissioner of Pakistan since both Sri Lanka and Pakistan are Commonwealth nations narrowly escaped the assassination bid while four Sri Lanka Army commandos and three bystanders died of the suspected C-4 plastic explosion.

Making a statement in Islamabad, Col. Wali was quoted having stated that it was not the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who attacked him but India’s powerful and feared RAW spy agency. Col. Bashir Wali Mohamed, who once headed Pakistani spy agency, before becoming an ambassador accused the Indian government of starting a proxy war in a third country.

The August 14 blast occurred on Pakistan’s Independence day, near the heavily guarded hotels where Indian and South African cricket teams were residing having come to Colombo for a tri-nation cricket match. The South African team immediately withdrew in fear while the Indian team stayed on.

The retired Pakistani army colonel summoned reporters to his residence in Islamabad to reveal his knowledge of the Indian involvement and alleged that the Indian government had been upset at his appointment and claimed that RAW had "begun its dirty games" against him even before his arrival in Colombo, Sri Lanka in June 2004. He drew the attention of the reporters of how retired Indian intelligence official B. Raman had written articles in Sri Lankan newspapers urging the island nation’s government not to accept his (Wali’s) credentials as high commissioner. B. Raman was recently quoted very often in the Tamil net even after the assassination alleging that Pakistan was involved in a bid to assassinate the LTTE supreme Velupillai Prabhakaran, the man who was directly responsible for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the husband of Sonia Gandhi, the President of India’s currently ruling Congress Party.

Wali denied that the cause of the assassination bid was a shipment of weapons that was to be shipped to Sri Lanka to fight the Tamil Tigers.He told reporters that he was the target of the attack of RAW and evidence collected pointed to that fact.

India’s RAW had been involved in huge explosions that killed hundreds of civilians at a time when RAW was involved in the training and supplying arms and ammunition to the Tamil rebels including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. Ultimately, using that military power LTTE assassinated other Tamil leaders with impunity in India and in Sri Lanka and ultimately killed former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi that brought an end to the short honeymoon of RAW and the LTTE. LTTE negotiator recently tried to re-establish the broken relationship through an interview broadcast in a New Delhi television station, NDTV