International

U.S., India see link to militants in Pakistan

WASHINGTON: American and Indian authorities have said there is now little doubt that militants inside Pakistan had directed the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Indian officials said they had identified three or four masterminds of the deadly assault, stepping up pressure on Pakistan to act against the perpetrators of one of the worst terrorist attacks in India’s history.

The emerging consensus came as the Bush administration increased its diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions between India and Pakistan over the attacks.

Both U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are expected to issue stern warnings to the government of Pakistan to crack down on militant groups in Pakistan near its borders with Indian-administered Kashmir and with Afghanistan, top American aides said.

Two senior American officials have said the U.S. warned India in mid-October of possible terrorist attacks against “touristy areas frequented by Westerners” in Mumbai, but that the information was not specific. Nonetheless, the officials said, the warning echoed other general alerts this year by India’s intelligence agency, raising questions about the adequacy of India’s counterterrorism measures.

Details of the attack planners also became clearer. The only gunman captured by the police told his interrogators that one of the main plotters was a fugitive known to Indian authorities: Yusuf Muzammil, a leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, according to a senior Indian police official and a Western official. The group, though officially banned and once focussed primarily on Kashmir, maintains its leadership in Pakistan and is believed to have moved its militant networks to Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Muzammil, who is the right-hand man to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakvhi, the operational commander of the group, talked by satellite phone to the attackers from Pakistan when the gunmen were in the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the Western official said. The attackers also used the cell phones of people they killed to call back to Muzammil somewhere in Pakistan, the official said.

The mounting evidence increased the pressure on the U.S. to find a way to resolve the tensions between Pakistan and India, two nuclear-armed neighbours. The officials said there was still no evidence that Pakistan’s government had a hand in the operation, though investigators were still searching for clues of outside support for the terrorists. “There’s very little doubt that L-e-T is responsible, but beyond that we need to learn more,” said a senior American official, who was briefed on the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity, citing its continuing nature.

Senior Bush administration officials sought to tamp down tensions. ``It’s important for there to be restraint on both sides and — but it’s also important to find out who was responsible,” Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters at the Pentagon.

The 10 heavily armed young men had all been trained by former army officers, the Mumbai police chief, Hassan Gafoor, told reporters. Though he refused to specify, the implication was that the army officers were Pakistani. The investigation has not yet turned up any links to organised crime figures or local collaborators, Mr. Gafoor said, though it was clear that the attackers had tried to pass themselves off as Indians.

They carried Indian college student identification cards, the police said. They called an Indian television station early on in their three-day standoff to broadcast what are common complaints of Indian Muslims, including the 2002 attacks on Muslims by Hindus in Gujarat, which left nearly 1,000 dead.

And in one of the most chilling accounts from last week, when a diner at the Kandahar restaurant at the Oberoi Hotel asked his tormentors, ``What have we done?” a gunman retorted: ``What was done in Godhra?” Godhra is the town in Gujarat where the sectarian violence began. Then, the gunman shot the diner, according to a witness.

“Their main intention is to say this is local homegrown terrorism,” Rakesh Maria, the city’s Joint Commissioner of Police, who is heading up the investigation, said late on Tuesday night.

He said that the confessions of the suspect in his custody had put to rest those claims.

At a meeting at Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, foreign diplomats urged Pakistani officials on Tuesday to take firm action against terrorism suspects, according to two diplomats who were there.

The diplomats also emphasised that the Mumbai attacks were not just a Pakistan-India matter but were of international proportions and involved the deaths of a number of foreigners, one diplomat said. — New York Times News Service

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