Pakistan Warns India It Will Respond to Any Attack

Pakistani security officials and media gather at the site of bomb explosion in Lahore, Pakistan on...

Pakistani security officials and media gather at the site of bomb explosion in Lahore, Pakistan on Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008. A car bomb exploded in a heavily guarded neighborhood of the eastern Pakistani city where many government officials live, leaving one woman dead and four people wounded, police said. (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)

(AP)

Pakistan warned India on Thursday not to launch a strike against it and vowed to respond to any attack — a sign that the relationship between the two nuclear powers remains strained in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.

Though the South Asian rivals have engaged in tit-for-tat accusations in recent weeks, both sides have repeatedly said they hope to avoid conflict. But India has not ruled out the use of force in response to the attacks, which it blames on a Pakistan-based militant group.

"We want peace, but should not be complacent about India," Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters in his hometown of Multan in central Pakistan. "We should hope for the best but prepare for the worst."

Pakistan and India have fought three wars since they were created in the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947.

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Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani echoed Qureshi's sentiments Thursday and urged the international community to pressure India to defuse the current tension.

He also repeated Pakistan's demand that India provide evidence to support its claim that the 10 gunmen who killed at least 164 people in Mumbai last month were Pakistani and had links to the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"Whenever we receive evidence, we will examine it and investigate it, and we will share it with our people," Gilani told reporters at the tomb of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in southern Pakistan, ahead of the first anniversary of her assassination on Dec. 27.

India has given Pakistan a letter from the lone surviving gunman involved in the attacks, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, reportedly saying he and the nine others were Pakistani. He also asked to meet with Pakistani envoys, but newspapers in Pakistan reported Thursday that the government has rejected the request because it has no record of Kasab as a Pakistani citizen.

"How can we give him consular access without having knowledge about his nationality?" Dawn newspaper quoted the head of Pakistan's Interior Ministry, Rehman Malik, as saying.