New Delhi - India on Tuesday expressed shock at theattack on Sri Lankan cricketers in Pakistan and said Islamabad should take urgent steps to dismantle terrorist infrastructure on its soil. "We are shocked at the audacious attack," a statement by India's External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash said. "... Terrorism based in Pakistan is a grave threat to the entire world."
Seven Sri Lankan cricketers were injured and seven people, including six police officers, were killed Tuesday when masked gunmen opened fire on a bus carrying the visiting cricket team to a match in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore.
The attack was similar to the one in India's financial capital of Mumbai in November, in which more than 170 people were killed by gunmen armed with automatic weapons and grenades. India has claimed that a Pakistan-based militant group, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, planned and executed that attack.
"Unless the infrastructure, facilities available to terrorist organizations in Pakistan are completely dismantled and the perpetrators brought to justice, repetition of these type of incidents will continue," Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told reporters.
India has given Pakistan a dossier of material linking the Mumbai attack to elements in Pakistan but has said it has so far not been satisfied with Pakistan's response.
"I request the Pakistani authorities not to divert the attention of the international community but to take courage in both hands and dismantle the terrorism infrastructure," Mukherjee said. "... Only then will such issues be adequately addressed."
Manish Tiwari - spokesman for the Congress Party, which leads the governing alliance in India - said: "The attack on Sri Lankan cricketers makes it evident that it is the result of the space that Pakistan has been conceding to terrorists and hardliners. If it continues, then it might lead Pakistan to a situation like Somalia."
The situation in Pakistan was grave, he said. "It is not just the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing but each finger does not know what the other is doing," he added.
India's opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) joined the condemnation of the attack. "The world will be compelled to recognize Pakistan as a terrorist state after this attack," BJP spokesman Rajiv Pratap Rudy said. "Our party was the first to oppose sending the Indian team to Pakistan."
The Indian government decided not to send its cricket team for a scheduled series of matches in Pakistan after the Mumbai terrorist attack. Pakistan then invited the Sri Lankan team to step in.
India's cricket team captain MS Dhoni, who is currently playing matches against New Zealand in that country, said in a televised post-match interview that the cricketing fraternity was shocked by the incident.
"Cricketers are soft targets," he said. "... No team would want to go to Pakistan now."
Players of both the Indian and New Zealand teams wore black armbands. Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma said the government had taken a conscious decision not to send its team to Pakistan.
"It was not possible to expose the Indian team, and though it was a difficult decision - we do not want to come in the way of people-to-people contacts - but it was taken to save our own cricketers," Sharma said.
Teams from other countries like Australia have also refused to play cricket in Pakistan in the past year because of security concerns.
The attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team has raised concerns about the safety of players in the region and the Cricket World Cup tournament scheduled to be held in the region in 2011 with matches in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
The English cricket team, which was playing a series in India in November, flew home during the three-day attack in Mumbai but returned later to complete some matches.
Asked about the security for the World Cup, Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram said: "Let the World Cup come. We will provide them security."
Cricket-crazy South Asia is estimated to provide more than 60 per cent of the revenue for international cricket and is its most lucrative market.
