By Bappa Majumdar and Robert Birsel

NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – India accused Pakistan on Monday of trying to shift blame for last month’s Mumbai attacks and demanded it do more to dismantle militant networks.

India and the United States have blamed Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) for the attacks, which killed 179 people, leading to a sharp rise in angry rhetoric between the nuclear-armed countries which have fought three wars.

Pakistan denies any links to the 60-hour assault on India’s financial heart, blaming “non-state actors,” and has promised to cooperate in investigations. However, Pakistan says India has provided no evidence for it to investigate.

“Pakistan’s response so far has demonstrated their earlier tendency to resort to a policy of denial and to seek to deflect and shift the blame and responsibility,” India Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said.

Mukherjee reiterated that India was keeping all its options open after the Mumbai attacks, comments the Indian media have widely interpreted to mean that a military response was still possible. Mukherjee said that was not his intent.

On Sunday, Mukherjee said India had given Pakistan specific evidence about who was behind the attack, including intercepted satellite telephone conversations and an account given by the lone surviving gunman, Ajmal Amir Kasab.

“We have highlighted that the infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan has to be dismantled permanently,” Mukherjee told a meeting of Indian envoys from 120 countries on Monday.

“Much more needs to be done,” he said, referring to Pakistan’s promises to crack down on militant groups such as the LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammad.

A Pakistani spokesman said India had provided no evidence and the only information it was getting was through the media.

“We are doing our own investigation but it can go only so far because we do not have anything from the scene of the crime, we do not have anything from India,” said Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Sadiq.

“I think we are doing enough, we are doing everything which is possible … We have done more than what is required by the U.N. Security Council,” he said.

“DEAL WITH THE PROBLEM”

A U.N. Security Council committee this month added four Lashkar leaders to a list of people and groups facing sanctions for ties to al Qaeda or the Taliban.

LeT was set up to fight Indian rule in Kashmir and has been linked by U.S. officials and analysts to Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence military spy agency, who they say use it as a tool to destabilize India.

The U.N. sanctions also covered what the committee said was a new alias for Lashkar-e-Taiba — the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD). Lashkar was banned in Pakistan in 2002.  Continued…