Chicago: Pakistan is the hotbed of al-Qaida terrorist network, Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani has said and pointed out that Islamabad continued to engage in cross border terrorism despite the peace initiative taken by New Delhi.

It is well known, Advani said, both ideologically and operationally, the main source of international terrorism lies in Pakistan.

Many groups based in Pakistan carrying out terrorist activities against India have links with al-Qaida, he told a gathering at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations on June 12.

Advani pointed out that though India has the second largest Muslim population after Indonesia, none of the al-Qaida operatives caught by the United States belong to it.

But Pakistan is the hotbed of al-Qaida, he remarked.

The reason, he told the audience, is that India is a democracy where everyone has the right to express his or her views and it does not discriminate on the basis of religion.

"Pakistan had long been and continues to be, a source of terrorism primarily against India but whose reverberations are also felt elsewhere," he said, stressing that both India and the US are threatened by the same source of terrorism.

Narrating the difficulty that India had to make other nations understand the threat of terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks, Advani said, “What was earlier dismissed as a tactical nuisance quickly came to be seen as a strategic threat seeking to undermine the very foundation on which the American society is built."

PTI