In a perpetual denial mode and contradicting Pakistan's Defence Minister Chaudhary Mukhtar Ahmad, country's High Commissioner to India Shahid Malik on Wednesday said Jaish-e-Mohmmad chief Maulana Masood Azhar, one of India's most-wanted terrorists, was not under house arrest and his whereabouts were not known to them."We are looking for him. He is not under house arrest. As far as I know, it (news reports of Azhar's house arrest) is wrong. He is not in Pakistan. We don't know where he is," Malik told Karan Thapar in 'India Tonight' programme of CNBC-TV18.He was responding to a question why Pakistan cannot hand over Azhar, who walked into freedom from an Indian prison in exchange for passengers of a hijacked Indian Airlines plane, as he was already in Pakistan custody.Malik's statement was in contradiction to Ahmad's interview to a TV channel a week ago when he had said Azhar was placed under house arrest but said would not be handed over to India.The High Commissioner also said Dawood Ibrahim, the Indian underworld king, was also not in Pakistan as claimed by New Delhi.Asked whether it will extradite the don if India provides proof of Dawood's presence in Pakistan, Malik said, ‘fact of the matter is that he is not in Pakistan.’Malik also claimed that country's intelligence agency ISI has no links with LeT, which is believed to be behind the Mumbai terror attacks.'KASAB IS NOT A PAK CITIZEN'Pak High Commissioner Shahid Malik said on Wednesday that Ajmal Kasab is not a Pakistani citizen.'The News' quoted Malik as saying that Maulana Masood Azhar was also not present in Pakistan. Recently residents of a village in Pakistan Punjab's Okara District have reportedly told a British daily that Ajmal Amir Kasab, the surviving gunman involved in last week's terrorist attacks on Mumbai, hails from there.According to a report in 'The Observer', electoral lists for Faridkot show 478 registered voters, including the name of Kasab's father Mohammed Amir.The paper further goes on to say that a villager, who cannot be named for his own protection, said the village was an active recruiting ground for the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba."We know that boy [caught in Mumbai] is from Faridkot,'' he said. ''We knew from the first night [of the attack]. They brainwash our youth about jihad, there are people who do it in this village. It is so wrong,'' he added.According to the villager and other locals, Ajmal has not lived in Faridkot for about four years but would return to see his family once a year and frequently talked of freeing Kashmir from Indian rule.The truth about Ajmal's origins are key to the ongoing investigation of where the attackers came from and will have a profound impact on relations between India and Pakistan.
