India, Britain work to prevent transport attacks
Source: Reuters
NEW DELHI, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Indian and British experts will share intelligence and devise ways to better protect their public transport systems from terrorist attacks, the two countries said on Thursday. The cooperation is part of a counter-terrorism agreement reached between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, when the two leaders held talks in London last month. Both countries have faced some of the most deadly attacks on public transport systems in recent times -- 56 people were killed in London last year when bombs exploded on underground trains while 186 died in serial blasts on commuter trains in India's commercial hub of Mumbai in July. "We have agreed to a meeting of our experts in the area of protecting critical national infrastructure such as mass transit systems and other assets," Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told a joint news conference with his British counterpart, Margaret Beckett. Beckett said New Delhi and London had obvious shared concerns about protecting public transport systems from attacks. "So there are some very concrete ways in which we are sharing our very unfortunate and tragic joint experience and trying to learn from each other's experience," she said. Indian officials said they also hoped to learn from London's success in foiling a plot to bomb trans-Atlantic airliners in August. Cooperation will include intelligence sharing and the use of technology to prevent such attacks. While the London blasts were blamed on British Muslim suicide bombers, India has charged Pakistan's military spy agency of plotting the Mumbai blasts and Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of executing them with the help of disaffected Indian Muslims. Pakistan and Lashkar have denied any links with the blasts. Although there are no known direct links between the London and Mumbai attacks, security experts say victims of such attacks need to work together to draft strategies to counter what they say is a global network of Islamist militant groups.
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