NEW DELHI, July 12: India’s top security official claimed to have evidence on Saturday of the involvement of ISI in the recent suicide attack on Delhi’s embassy in Kabul and said time had come to destroy the spy agency.

“We not only suspect but we have a fair amount of intelligence,” India’s National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan told television channels.

He was commenting on speculation about Pakistan’s involvement in the devastating attack on Monday.

“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,” he said.

“We have no doubt that the ISI is behind this. We are in the favour of the peace process, but the ISI is not in any way part of it. The ISI is playing evil. The ISI needs to be destroyed,” Mr Narayanan said. Explaining India’s stand on the talks with Pakistan, he said: “The peace process is being initiated by the prime minister and is even predated. It went on and then there was a hiccup towards the end of 2006. Since 2007, it has not picked up. However, we have not slowed it down. We hope that the new administration (in Pakistan) will take it up again.”

India this week called off scheduled talks between the two sides in Islamabad, saying the official who was to head them was away in Kabul to attend to the emergency there.