Washington: US officials suspect that ISI leaked the CIA station chief's name in Pakistan because of a lawsuit filed in the US naming the ISI and its chiefs by the relatives of the victims of the Mumbai terror attacks, a media report said Saturday.
Tensions between Washington and Islamabad worsened earlier last month when the CIA was forced to abruptly withdraw its station chief from Pakistan after his identity was made public in a civil lawsuit there, suing the CIA for deaths in the drone attacks, the propublica.org reported.
A US official said the move may have been "tit-for-tat" because of a recent civil lawsuit filed in New York by relatives of the victims of the Mumbai attacks naming the ISI and its chiefs as plaintiffs along with the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) plays a dominant role in Pakistan's fractured government. Most experts see its long-standing alliance with militant groups as a mix of geo-political strategy -- extremists are a useful weapon against India -- and anti-Western ideology, the website said.
IANS
First Published: Saturday, January 01, 2011, 22:01