Pakistan Withdraws Offer to Send Spy Chief to India to Investigate Terrorist Attacks

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Pakistan on Saturday withdrew an offer to send its spy chief to India to help investigate the Mumbai terrorist attacks, damaging efforts to head off a crisis between the nuclear-armed rivals.

Indian officials have linked the attacks to "elements" in Pakistan, raising the prospect of a breakdown in peace talks between the South Asian nations that has alarmed the U.S.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani insisted Friday that his country was not involved in the carnage that left more than 190 people dead in India's financial capital.

With Pakistan promising to help catch those responsible, Gilani's office said the head of the Inter Services Intelligence agency would go to India at the request of India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

However, Zahid Bashir, a spokesman for Gilani, told The Associated Press on Saturday that the decision had been changed and that a lower-ranking intelligence official would travel instead.

He declined to explain the about-face, which followed sharp criticism from some Pakistani opposition politicians and a cool response from the army, which controls the spy agency.

Bashir didn't say who would be making the trip or when.

India has repeatedly accused Pakistan of complicity in terrorist attacks on its soil, some of which it traces to militant groups fighting Indian rule in the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir.

Pakistan insists its support for militants in Kashmir, where anti-India sentiment runs high, is only moral and political.

Relations have improved markedly in recent years, but nose-dived again in July when India accused the Pakistani spy agency of involvement in the bombing of its embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

The United States has being trying to persuade Islamabad to shift its security focus from India, with which it has fought three wars, to Islamic militants along the Afghan border.

President-elect Barack Obama has identified rapprochement between the two countries as a main plank of his plan to stabilize Afghanistan and defeat al-Qaida.

Reflecting U.S. concern, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called the foreign minister of India twice, as well as Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, since the crisis began.

"There were very worrying tensions in the region," said Gordon Duguid, a State Department spokesman. "She was calling the president of Pakistan to get his read on how those tensions might be affected."