Hamid Karzai at the presidential palace in Kabul, where he met family members of two Afghans beheaded by Pakistani militants. (AP)

Kabul, July 14 (Agencies): Afghan President Hamid Karzai today said Pakistani agents were behind the bombing of the Indian embassy last week, the first time he has directly accused Islamabad of involvement in the suicide attack that killed 58 people.

The July 7 attack bore all the hallmarks of a foreign intelligence agency, Afghan officials had said after the strike, but stopped short of naming any country.

India’s national security adviser M.K. Narayanan, too, had blamed Pakistan’s spy agency ISI last week.

“We not only suspect but we have a fair amount of intelligence,” he told television channels when asked whether India suspected Pakistan’s involvement in the attack.

“The ISI needs to be destroyed. We made this point, whenever we have had a chance, to interlocutors across the world…. There might have been some tactical restraint for some time, obviously that restraint is no longer present.”

Afghanistan has already blamed Pakistan for a string of attacks, including an assassination bid on Karzai in April and a June assault on a prison that freed some 400 militants.

Karzai last month threatened to send troops into Pakistan to fight militants there if Islamabad failed to take action.

Karzai said Pakistani agents were behind the embassy attack, the beheading of two Afghans in Pakistan last month, the killing of two women in Ghazni province and 24 people in a suicide blast in Uruzgan province on Sunday.

“Now this has become clear. And we have told the government of Pakistan that the killings of people in Afghanistan, the destruction of bridges in Afghanistan... are carried out by Pakistan’s intelligence and Pakistan’s military departments,” Karzai told reporters.

He gave no evidence to back up his accusations.