Prime Minister Manmohan Singh being greeted at Colombo airport on Friday. (AP)

On board the Prime Minister’s aircraft, Aug. 1: Manmohan Singh will be armed with US claims of “direct proof” of ISI role in the bombing of India’s Kabul embassy when he meets his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani tomorrow in Colombo.

Indian government sources said Singh was likely to broach the July 7 blast at the meeting, to be held between 5.45pm and 6.15pm on the sidelines of the Saarc summit.

US intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence helped plan the bombing that killed 50-odd people, including an Indian defence attache and a diplomat, The New York Times reported today.

“It confirmed some suspicions that I think were widely held,” the paper quoted a state department official as saying. “It was sort of this ‘aha’ moment. There was a sense that there was finally direct proof.”

American officials told the NYT the conclusion of ISI involvement was based on intercepted communications between officials in Pakistan’s spy service and the militants who carried out the attack.

They would not say specifically what kind of assistance the ISI provided to the militants, believed to be loyal to Pashtun leader Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, but added that the Pakistani officials were not renegades, indicating their actions might have been authorised by superiors.

“Things have happened in the recent past, which are unfortunate and which, quite frankly, have affected the future of dialogue. That is why we are talking to Pakistan, that is why we are carrying on these conversations,” Indian foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon told a news conference in Colombo.

Asked specifically about the Kabul attack, Menon likened it to a “jigsaw puzzle” and said it was clear as to where the “puzzle leads”.

Indian officials said the Kabul bombing was the “cleanest item” (clearest proof) to show the ISI’s dubious role.

Asked if India would be giving Pakistan any evidence of its own at upcoming meetings, one of the sources said: “It’s a clever move to ask for evidence.”

He explained that Delhi would be unwilling to reveal its sources of information, especially human intelligence, and Pakistan knows this.

But he added sarcastically: “Every country knows about the ISI role; but not Pakistan. Pakistan has no evidence!”

The sources said all intelligence establishments know that evidence comes in many forms, including intercepts. They wondered how Pakistan, after having spent huge amounts to make its intelligence machinery “sophisticated”, missed such inputs.

The NYT had earlier reported that the deputy director of American spy agency CIA, Stephen R. Kappes, had travelled to Pakistan this month to confront senior Islamabad officials with information about the ISI’s support to militants.

US officials said the communications were intercepted before the July 7 blasts and were on Kappes’s Pakistan agenda, but were not detailed enough for them to warn of any specific attack.

But the Indian officials hinted the Pakistani government might not always fully know what the ISI was up to. “The government can be different from a rogue intelligence agency,” one of them said.

US and Pakistani officials have acknowledged that President George W. Bush had on Monday asked senior Islamabad officials: “Who is in control of ISI?” They said Bush raised the issue of the ISI’s divided loyalties with Gilani, too.

Asked if India found it easier to deal with President Pervez Musharraf than the democratically elected government, one of the Indian officials quipped: “It could be easy to deal with a single-point authority.”

He, however, refrained from blaming any external agencies for the recent blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, merely saying: “We have some leads. Investigations are still on.”

The Indian officials are also cautious about the recent ceasefire violations that have strained India-Pakistan ties. “We don’t want to over-emphasise this issue,” an official said.