Pakistan's government says it will fight a US lawsuit implicating chief of the country's top spy agency in connection with the Mumbai 2008 attacks, Press TV reported.
Pakistan's foreign ministry said in a statement on Thursday that it will defend past and present chiefs of its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.
"The government of Pakistan has taken a firm decision to strongly contest the suit filed against the ISI, its present and past directors general," the statement read.
"The government of Pakistan and its embassy in Washington shall defend the legal suit on behalf of ISI and its directors general fully and properly," the statement added.
A New York court has recently asked Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the director general of the ISI, to appear next month.
The court orders came in the wake of lawsuits filed in the US by a wounded American and the heirs of four others who were killed in the attacks in the Indian commercial hub.
The lawsuit accuses the ISI of directly assisting the 10 gunmen, who carried out the attacks.
"This is not something we invented. Our complaint is drawn from the public record," the wounded US national's lawyer, Jim Kreindler, told AFP in New York.
However, Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani says the ISI boss will not testify in the US court.
"ISI is the most sensitive organization of the country and we are also sensitive about this issue," Gilani told lawmakers during a parliamentary session in Islamabad on last Thursday.
On November 26, 2008, ten gunmen targeted Mumbai's luxury hotels in a coordinated attack. There were also separate attacks on the city's main railway station and a synagogue.
At least 160 people died and about 300 people were injured in the attacks.
India has said that Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militants were responsible for the attacks and demanded Islamabad take action for what it says is the latest anti-India attack launched from Pakistani soil.
Pakistan has rejected the involvement of its government in the attacks, saying that "non-state actors" were involved in the incident. Pakistan says it has intensified its crackdown on a militant group suspected in the Mumbai terror attacks.
Relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbors have further soured since the incident.
A recent media report has said that US intelligence officials were aware of plans to attack Mumbai years before the terrorist incident in Mumbai.
A report published by the The Washington Post in mid October said that the FBI had been tipped off in 2005 about an American national, who masterminded attacks on the Indian financial hub three years later.
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