ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said yesterday his government remained committed to punishing Pakistani nationals accused of taking part in the Mumbai attacks if "credible" evidence is given against them.
Gilani made the comments during talks with Richard Boucher, the US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, who arrived in Islamabad in a bid to defuse simmering tensions between Pakistan and India.
Gilani spoke of "Pakistan's persistent efforts to defuse the current tensions with India, and his government's commitment to take action against any Pakistani national in case credible evidence is provided," his office said.
A number of US officials have visited both Pakistan and India, including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her deputy John Negroponte, following the attacks, in a bid to defuse tensions between two countries.
Boucher also met Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and President Asif Ali Zardari, who gave him an award for his service to Pakistan.
Zardari said Boucher had been "instrumental in promoting a stable, broad-based and long-term Pakistan-US relationship".
Boucher urged India and Pakistan to work together to investigate the attacks, saying those behind the carnage will only be found if both countries co-operate.
"Each side has pieces of the puzzle and they need to be known to each other," he said.
Boucher refused to reveal any details of the evidence he had seen, but said it was "clear that the attackers had links that lead to Pakistani soil."
Gilani and Boucher also discussed Pakistan's ongoing co-operation in the US-led "war on terror," with the US diplomat quoted by Gilani's office as saying Washington "fully appreciated Pakistan's difficulties in the fight against terror."
Meanwhile, Zardari will today make his first official trip to Afghanistan for talks with President Hamid Karzai on how to tackle the resurgent Taliban.
l Suspected militants fighting for the enforcement of Islamic law in northwest Pakistan shot dead two people yesterday, one day after a policeman and a soldier were found beheaded.
Pakistan's military has been battling the Taliban-linked militants in the picturesque Swat valley - once a tourist attraction - for more than a year, but the violence has continued unabated, and even appears to be escalating
Since January 1, the militants have killed 25 people, many of them government employees, security or police officials. Some of those killed were beheaded.
One of the victims was a female dancer who did not heed the militants' warnings to abandon her profession.
Most of the killings have been claimed by militants loyal to radical Muslim cleric Maulana Fazlullah, who has links to Pakistan's Taliban movement and who has launched a campaign in Swat for the imposition of Sharia law.
Separately, Taliban militants executed three people in a restive Pakistani tribal region near the Afghan border after accusing them of spying for the US.
The body of a 25-year-old local tribesman was found hung upside down in a tree in the town of Naurak in North Waziristan.
The man had been kidnapped from the region's main town of Miranshah last week.
The bullet-riddled bodies of two Afghan refugees were dumped on a roadside in the same area.
Meanwhile, gunmen riding motorcycles shot dead two Shi'ite men in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta.
The attackers stopped a rickshaw driver and his friend on a busy main road in Quetta, the capital of restive Baluchistan province, shot them multiple times and fled.
