KABUL: Afghanistan and Pakistan were locked in a war of words on Thursday over a shrine bombing that killed at least 55 people in Kabul and which the Afghan government blamed on a Pakistani terror group.
Islamabad called for an end to the “blame game” after Kabul demanded action against the group, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, whose purported claim of responsibility for Tuesday’s attack has not been confirmed independently.
“It is high time to get out of the blame game as such and to move forward in the spirit of cooperation,” said foreign office spokesman Abdul Basit.
“Publicly accusing Pakistan of unfounded events and things do create problems at some stage”, he told reporters.
“We would like to have a relationship that is free of recrimination and blame game,” Basit added.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan are tense, and frequently spiral into mutual accusations over the violence plaguing both their countries.
Kabul said Thursday that it was up to Pakistan to investigate without waiting any longer after Pakistan called for hard evidence to support claims that Jhangvi was responsible.
“It’s up to Pakistan to take action and find out where and how the contact was made by Lashkar-i-Jhangvi from inside Pakistan. They shouldn’t wait for us to provide them with evidence,” Aimal Faizi, Karzai’s spokesman, told AFP.
Faizi said an Afghan investigation was under way but it is thought officials do not currently have evidence of the group’s involvement.
Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, an outlawed militant group which has links to al Qaeda and the Taliban, has been blamed for killing thousands of Shias and whipping up sectarian hatred in Pakistan.
But there has been no confirmation of a purported claim of responsibility for the Kabul attacks from Lashkar-i-Jhangvi splinter group al-Alami.
Officials and experts fear that Tuesday’s attack may have been designed to whip up sectarian conflict in Afghanistan, which has not previously suffered the scale of such violence experienced in Iraq and Pakistan.
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