India (Superthread)

[a_majoor]

Further analysis:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTk5YzgwZDc3NTliMDAwM2QxOGNjOWRmNTZjZTZmNDY=&w=MA==

It’s Not the Cold War
Updating strategy to fight the ideology.

By Mark Steyn

When terrorists attack, media analysts go into Sherlock Holmes mode, metaphorically prowling the crime scene for footprints, as if the way to solve the mystery is to add up all the clues. The Bombay gunmen seized British and American tourists. Therefore, it must be an attack on Westerners!

Not so, said Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria. If they’d wanted to do that, they’d have hit the Hilton or the Marriott or some other target-rich chain hotel. The Taj and the Oberoi are both Indian owned, and popular watering holes with wealthy Indians.

Okay, how about this group that’s claimed credit for the attack? The Deccan Mujahideen. As a thousand TV anchors asked on Wednesday night, “What do we know about them?”

Er, well, nothing. Because they didn’t exist until they issued the press release. “Deccan” is the name of the vast plateau that covers most of the triangular peninsula that forms the lower half of the Indian sub-continent. It comes from the Prakrit word “dakkhin, which means “south.” Which means nothing at all. “Deccan Mujahideen” is like calling yourself the “Continental Shelf Liberation Front.”

Okay. So does that mean this operation was linked to al-Qaeda? Well, no. Not if by “linked to” you mean a wholly owned subsidiary coordinating its activities with the corporate head office.

It’s not an either/or scenario, it’s all of the above. Yes, the terrorists targeted locally owned hotels. But they singled out Britons and Americans as hostages. Yes, they attacked prestige city landmarks like the Victoria Terminus, one of the most splendid and historic railway stations in the world. But they also attacked an obscure Jewish community center. The Islamic imperialist project is a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other.

In the ten months before this week’s atrocity, Muslim terrorists killed over 200 people in India and no-one paid much attention. Just business as usual, alas. In Bombay, the perpetrators were cannier. They launched a multiple indiscriminate assault on soft targets, and then in the confusion began singling out A-list prey: Not just wealthy Western tourists, but local orthodox Jews, and municipal law enforcement. They drew prominent officials to selected sites, and then gunned down the head of the antiterrorism squad and two of his most senior lieutenants. They attacked a hospital, the place you’re supposed to take the victims to, thereby destabilizing the city’s emergency-response system.

And, aside from dozens of corpses, they were rewarded with instant, tangible, economic damage to India: the Bombay Stock Exchange was still closed on Friday, and the England cricket team canceled their tour (a shameful act).

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.

But we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.

It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

Many of us, including the incoming Obama administration, look at this as a law-enforcement matter. Bombay is a crime scene, so let’s surround the perimeter with yellow police tape, send in the forensics squad, and then wait for the DA to file charges. There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: “A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station.” The photo of the “suspected gunman” showed a man holding a gun. We don’t know much about him — he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of western colonialist economic oppression or a former vice-president of Lehman Bros embarking on an exciting midlife career change — but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not a “suspected gunman” but a gunman. “This kind of silly political correctness infects reporters and news services world-wide,” wrote John Hinderaker of Powerline. “They think they’re being scrupulous — the man hasn’t been convicted of being a gunman yet! — when in fact they’re just being foolish. But the irrational conviction that nothing can be known unless it has been determined by a court and jury isn’t just silly, it’s dangerous.”

Just so. This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.

Whoops, my apologies. I mean “suspected ideology.”

© 2008 Mark Steyn

 

[ENGINEERS WIFE]

India terrorist attack blamed on 10 armed men
60-hour rampage killed at least 195; 'we will recover,' says one resident

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27957539/

 

[STONEY]

Wonder why it took Indian Police, Army @ Commandoes 4 days to overcome 10 terriorists  who caused 175 deaths + hundreds wounded.   

 

[tomahawk6]

Terrorist beaten by angry police and mob.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eauxgve-_Vk

 

[Pea]

My uncle is there working right now. He's due to come home in a week or so. Thankfully he's been safe so far throughout this ordeal. Thoughts to the families of the wounded/killed.

 

[daftandbarmy]

More 'we told you so':

US intelligence warned India of Mumbai attack in mid-October – Report

December 1, 2008, 11:22 PM (GMT+02:00)

DEBKAfile's intelligence sources report that the Indian spy agency RAW (the Research and Analysis Wing) caught wind of a terrorist threat for Mumbai in late August, three months before the event. More information was collected by RAW during September and October about the shape of the attack and its targets and passed to the American NSA.
The American ABC TV reported on Dec. 1 that Indian intelligence also intercepted a satellite phone call to a number in Pakistan known to be used by a leader of the Kashmiri Lashkar e-Taiba, which is accused of staging the Mumbai attack. This group is known for its ties to al Qaeda and Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. This enabled the American NSA to monitor the calls terrorists made by Thuraya mobile communications system satellite phones. That is how they were able to warn their Indian counterparts in mid-October of a potential attack "from the sea against hotels and business centers in Mumbai," as ABC reported. The Taj Palace Hotel was mentioned.
DEBKAfile's sources add that the Thuraya 3 satellite system serves a population of 2.3 billion in the Middle East and Asia. Owned by Abu Dhabi, many of its clients are Muslim.
The warning was relayed by US government agencies to the Manmohan Singh government which passed it on to political officials in Mumbai, India's financial capital.
There it stopped. The warning never reached the city's security or marine authorities which might have intercepted the terrorists' boats as they landed. Indian's special counter-terror units were taken completely by surprise when the Islamists struck the city Wednesday, Nov. 26.
These revelations raise two troubling questions: Why did the Indian government fail to act to pre-empt the terrorist attack? And why did the Bush administration, when it was clear that the Indians were doing nothing, not issue a public warning about a terrorist attack in the making as it has done in former cases?
At all events, the disclosure about the communications between US and Indian intelligence refutes the comment from US Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in London that Washington had no information linking the Mumbai attack to Pakistan.

http://www1.debka.com/headline_print.php?hid=5748

 

[twistedcables]

This is what the turning of the tide sounds like...


http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/547107

Krittivas Mukherjee
Reuters News Agency

MUMBAI – Mumbai's top Muslim clerics vowed on Tuesday to block the burial of nine Islamist militants who killed 183 people in a three-day rampage last week, saying their acts were an affront to Islam.

"Such demons – they will not find an inch of land in any Muslim cemetery," Maulana Sayed Moinuddin Ahsraf, secretary of the All-India Sunni Jamiat-ulema, told Reuters.

He spoke after a meeting of Muslim clerics and leaders from the Indian state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital.

In past attacks by Islamists in India, attackers killed have been buried. The ordinary practice is for Muslim burials to be conducted quickly, within a few hours of death.

"Just because you call yourself Musa, Azim or Rehman you don't become a Muslim. These people who carried out such attacks cannot be," said Syed Noori, another Muslim leader who attended Tuesday's meeting.

Ten Islamist militants armed with AK-47s and grenades let loose on two of Mumbai's best-known luxury hotels and other landmarks across the city of 18 million during a 60-hour frenzy that ended when commandos killed the ninth gunmen.

A 10th was arrested after a mob set upon him.

India's minority Muslims, forming about 13 per cent of the 1.1 billion population, have felt under siege every time Islamist militants launched an attack in the country.

"We have even written to the government conveying our decision. Our Muslim brothers across the country are unanimous about it," he told Reuters.

Asked what could be done with the bodies Noori said: "That's the government's headache."

 

[ModlrMike]

Good for them!

 

[Haggis]

Positive proof that extremism doesn't personify Islam.

 

[jollyjacktar]

Hopefully this indeed is the tipping point for the supposed silent majority and we might see further demonising of these assrats.

It is indeed a sin against Islam, so my wife tells me.  It can be difficult at times for me to remember and not paint them all with the same brush. 

 

[leroi]

A Solemn Israel Buries Dead From Mumbai Attack

December 2, 2008  New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/world/middleeast/03funerals.html?em

JERUSALEM — A somber Israel on Tuesday buried six victims of last week’s terrorist attack on a Jewish outreach center in Mumbai, India.

Two of the victims, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, and his wife, Rivka, 28, were serving as emissaries in India for the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement when they were killed. They were buried side by side after dark in the Chabad portion of the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

The rabbi, who held dual Israeli and American citizenship, and his wife, an Israeli, had run the center in Mumbai for the past five years.

Israelis have been deeply moved by the story of the couple and their son Moshe, 2, who survived the attack on the center when his Indian nanny scooped him up and escaped from the building more than 12 hours into the bloody siege.

Moshe arrived in Israel on Monday night, along with his nanny, Sandra Samuel, and Mrs. Holtzberg’s father, on an Israeli Air Force flight that transported the six bodies.

Chabad spokesmen said the couple were buried near their eldest son, who died two years ago of Tay-Sachs, a genetic disease. A middle son is hospitalized in Israel with the same illness.

The memorial ceremony started hours earlier in Kfar Chabad, a village south of Tel Aviv where there is a replica of the red-brick building at 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, the world headquarters of Chabad.

President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, the chief rabbis of Israel and the Indian ambassador attended the service at Kfar Chabad.

“For several days now, the whole world has had to answer the question of a small child, Moshe, who is asking, ‘Where is my mother?’ ” Mr. Peres said in his eulogy. “The world must answer why a wonderful woman like Rivka was killed, why a holy man like Gavriel was killed and why Moshe is left an orphan. We will not rest and we will not relax until an answer is found.”

In his eulogy, Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, the chairman of Chabad’s education arm, said of the orphaned boy: “You will be the child of the entire nation of Israel. You are an emissary, and an emissary you shall remain.”

Mrs. Holtzberg’s father revealed in his speech that his daughter was pregnant at the time she was slain.

Among the other hostages buried on Tuesday in Israel was Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, 38, a kosher food supervisor and the father of eight. A member of an ultra-Orthodox sect that opposes Zionism, Mr. Teitelbaum, an American, rejected Israeli citizenship though he lived in Jerusalem. His family requested a funeral without state symbols.

Another of those buried, Norma Schwartzblatt-Rabinowitz, 50, from Mexico, had planned to immigrate to Israel via India this week.

Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Chabad in Brooklyn, said that more than two dozen people from the Crown Heights community flew to Israel for the funeral of Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife. At the Lubavitcher Yeshiva in Brooklyn, more than 1,000 people gathered at 6 a.m. Tuesday to watch a live feed of the two-and-a-half-hour funeral, which was recorded and is available at the Web site www.chabad.org.

Liz Robbins contributed reporting from New York.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the Copyright Act.

Taliban say they'll help army fight India
Offer to Pakistan viewed as attempt to escalate tensions
Chris Brummitt, Associated Press, 3 Dec 08
Article link

Taliban fighters battling Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border volunteered yesterday to fight alongside the army if war breaks out with traditional foe India over the Mumbai attack.

Analysts say the offer is meant to fan the flames of anti-Hindu sentiment and draw support away from Islamabad's fight against al-Qaida and Taliban militants in tribal regions close to Afghanistan.

The government, which is appealing for calm, has not responded.

"That is what they would love, to see the attention of the Pakistan army shift from the tribal areas to the eastern border with India," said defense analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi.

The Taliban's offer came in a video recording by its deputy chief, Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, that was made available to reporters yesterday.

"If India launches a war on Pakistan, we will divide the fight into two parts. The air defense will be the responsibility of the military, and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan will fight the war on ground," he said. "If it makes a mistake to attack Pakistan, Tehrik-e-Taliban will defend Pakistan and Islam."....

More on link

 

[tomahawk6]

These weapons were captured from the dead tango's.Pakistan Ordinance Factories manufactures these weapons under license from HK, and they are under the control of the Pakistani Ministry of Defense.Pretty strong link I would say.

 

[tamtam10]

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai this past week were extremly tragic. What scares me even moreso, however, is that something like that could happen here in Canada or the United States, and Canada could be to blame for it just like Pakistan is being blamed by India. Canada is seen as a safe haven to terrorists, and is home to the most terrorist organizations in the world besides the United States. If a major attack happened in the US from terrorists who lived in Canada, we could be in big trouble. It's time Canada stiffens its immigration policy and does more to weed out the terrorists in our country.

 

[1feral1]

These weapons were captured from the dead tango's.Pakistan Ordinance Factories manufactures these weapons under license from HK, and they are under the control of the Pakistani Ministry of Defense.Pretty strong link I would say.

TH6, are these MP5's POF made?? POF appear to have the latest plastic lowers. Go here for a squizz at POF http://www.pof.gov.pk/index.aspx navigate as required.

Cheers,

Wes

 

[1feral1]

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai this past week were extremly tragic. What scares me even moreso, however, is that something like that could happen here in Canada or the United States, and Canada could be to blame for it just like Pakistan is being blamed by India. Canada is seen as a safe haven to terrorists, and is home to the most terrorist organizations in the world besides the United States. If a major attack happened in the US from terrorists who lived in Canada, we could be in big trouble. It's time Canada stiffens its immigration policy and does more to weed out the terrorists in our country.

We are only as strong as our weakest link.

Both Canada and Australia have stopped attacks before they've happened.

The threat is real. Right now as you read this many in our own countries are planning all sorts of nasty things. Lucky we have a busy network of agencies who right now are working to prevent such things from happening.

OWDU

 

[tomahawk6]

OW there is some confusion in the western media about those guns.They have been portrayed as terrorist weapons when in fact they may have been NSG or MARCOS weapons.Here is a wider shot I have found.  :-[

 

[old medic]

India unsettled by warning of an attack by air
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan5-2008dec05,0,7976024.story

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and New Delhi -- India remains on edge amid reports of a threat of an attack by air, adding to people's fears of vulnerability after last week's brazen rampage by gunmen who landed on Mumbai's famed shoreline by boat.

The new threat was contained in an e-mailed warning that referred to the coming anniversary Saturday of one of the most inflammatory events in India's recent history: the 1992 destruction by Hindu mobs of a centuries-old mosque in the north Indian town of Ayodha. That incident has been a flashpoint of religious tension throughout South Asia.

Survivors of last week's attack in Mumbai, which left more than 170 people dead, have been quoted as saying that at least one of the gunmen cited revenge for what happened in Ayodha as a motive behind their coordinated assault on luxury hotels and other busy spots in India's biggest metropolis.

Early today, Indian commandos combed New Delhi's international airport after reports that shots had been fired there. The cause of the scare remained unclear, but an airport official reached by telephone said that no one had been killed, despite an initial report by the British Broadcasting Corp. that Indian security forces had shot six gunmen to death.

The airport, which serves many international flights in the early morning hours, was operating normally by 3 a.m, Reuters reported.

Although the electronic threat of a possible airborne attack focused on the capital, New Delhi, and the southern cities of Bangalore and Chennai, airports throughout the country went on high alert. Authorities added extra layers of security, including beefed-up patrols of armed guards and sniffer dogs and more thorough inspections of passengers and their belongings.

"We are prepared as usual," Fali Homi Major, chief of the Indian Air Force, told reporters.

That statement, however, was not likely to reassure many Indians, who have reacted with incredulity and growing anger to news that their government failed to act on repeated intelligence, including from the United States, warning of a possible terrorist attack on Mumbai by sea. Tens of thousands of Indians have taken to the streets in protest, accusing the government of not protecting its citizens.

Wednesday night, Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, became the latest political casualty of the attacks when the country's ruling Congress Party accepted his resignation from office.

Most of the investigation into the attacks has focused on the lone captured gunman, who was seized at the bustling railway station where he and an accomplice allegedly fired indiscriminately into the crowds.

Investigators have said he has detailed the involvement of a Pakistani militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and its training of the assailants at camps in Pakistan. Investigators also allege that Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, a known senior commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba, helped mastermind the plot. Indian authorities have also named another Lashkar leader, Yusuf Muzammil. Pakistan has said nothing about the accusations against either man, other than indicating it will not accede to India's demand to hand them over.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a visit Thursday to Islamabad, said Pakistan's government "understands its responsibilities" in responding to terrorism in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.

Rice said the sophisticated nature of the 60-hour assault, which targeted luxury hotels and other Mumbai landmarks, underscored the need for a swift and thorough investigation.

"That means there is urgency to getting to the bottom of it," she said. "There is urgency to bringing the perpetrators to justice, and there is urgency to using the information to disrupt and prevent further attacks."

Rice, who visited India a day earlier, was publicly supportive of Pakistan's fledgling civilian government and its actions in response to the attacks, telling a news conference she was "quite satisfied" with her talks with senior government and military officials.

But a senior Pakistani official familiar with the discussions said the tone was tougher in private, with Rice stressing U.S. expectations that Pakistan aggressively pursue evidence against militant groups on its own. A similar message was delivered a day earlier by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen.

President Asif Ali Zardari reiterated a willingness to cooperate, his office said, pledging "strong action" against any Pakistani elements found to have been involved in the attack. But Pakistani authorities have not acknowledged a link between the attacks and any group based on Pakistani soil, saying it was up to India to provide proof.

 

[old medic]

In Pakistan, Rice calls for "urgent" pursuit of terrorists
By Kim Barker |  Chicago Tribune correspondent
    10:29 AM CST, December 4, 2008
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-rice-pakistan-081204,0,5513287.story

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan - As Indian authorities named two senior Pakistani militants they say planned last week's 60-hour siege in Mumbai, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that action was needed "urgently and transparently" to track down the perpetrators.

Rice arrived in Pakistan Thursday, the day after visiting India, to try to calm tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors after the attacks that killed 171 people in Mumbai. After meeting with the country's prime minister and president, she praised Pakistan's leaders for being committed to the war on terror but also said they needed to track down terrorists who plan attacks from Pakistani soil.

"This was a sophisticated attack, a level of sophistication that we haven't seen here on the sub-continent before," Rice said. "That means that there is urgency to getting to the bottom of it. There is urgency to bringing the perpetrators to justice. And there is an urgency to using the information to disrupt and prevent further attacks."

Meanwhile, several news organizations quoted unidentified government officials in Mumbai as naming two Pakistanis with the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group as responsible for planning the attacks.

The Associated Press said Indian officials pointed to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and Yusuf Muzammil, two senior leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba, as the masterminds, and said both men lived in Pakistan. The one surviving militant allegedly told Mumbai police he trained with Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan.

Pakistan has demanded that India turn over evidence linking any Pakistani to the attacks and so far has refused to turn over 20 militants wanted by India. But on Thursday, Rice urged Pakistan to act.

"There is a lot of information out there, a lot," Rice said. "And so this isn't an issue of sharing evidence."

With this crisis, Rice and other U.S. diplomats are riding a fine line between Pakistan and India, historic enemies that have fought three wars since independence in 1947 but both considered key allies of the U.S. Pakistan's help is seen as crucial to fighting Taliban and al-Qaeda militants along the country's border with Afghanistan. And India, the world's largest democracy, is a major economic partner and seen as a counterweight to Chinese and extremist influence in the region.

In a nod toward Pakistan, Rice said Thursday that the country had been a victim of terrorism. In response to a question about possible India military intervention in Pakistan, Rice said cooperation was a more effective response.

"Let me be very clear. I have heard nothing but reasonable discussion and responsible discussion in both India and Pakistan about the problems here, about the attacks in Mumbai," Rice said.

"Obviously, the Indian government is concerned and determined to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice, determined to try to prevent the next attack. I found a Pakistani leadership that understands the importance of doing that, particularly in rooting out terrorists and rounding up whoever perpetrated this attack."

Rice's visit to India was planned and announced for days; her visit to Pakistan was secretive, likely because of security fears. She arrived at 9:08 a.m., met Pakistani officials, held a nine-minute press conference and left before 2 p.m.

 

[old medic]

Top Indian official admits 'lapses' in attacks
The Associated Press

MUMBAI, India -- India's top law enforcement official admitted Friday there were government "lapses" in last week's terrorist attacks on Mumbai, amid a public uproar over security and intelligence failures in the deadly siege.

"There have been lapses. I would be less than truthful if I said there had been no lapses," new Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told reporters, saying he was seeking to bolster the country's security.

The assault on India's financial capital left 171 dead and 239 wounded. Chidambaram, only days in the post after the previous minister was ousted after the attacks, made the acknowledgment as new details surfaced that a Pakistani militant group had used an Indian operative as far back as 2007 to scout targets in the Mumbai plot.

Indian officials have accused Pakistani-based extremists in the Nov. 26-29 attacks, an assertion echoed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday.

"The territory of a neighbouring country has been used for perpetrating this crime," Singh said after meeting with visiting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. "We expect the international community to wake up and recognize that terror anywhere and everywhere constitutes a threat to world peace and prosperity."

The surviving gunman, Ajmal Amir Kasab, 21, told interrogators he had been sent by the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and identified two of the plot's masterminds, according to two Indian government officials familiar with the inquiry.

Soon after it was banned in 2002 amid U.S pressure, Lashkar-e-Taiba changed its name to Jamaat-ud-Dawa, according to the U.S. State Department. The U.S. lists both groups as terrorist organizations.

Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, who heads Jamaat-ud-Dawa, though U.S. authorities in May described him as the overall leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba, denied in an interview that there was a Pakistani hand behind the attacks, and called on Indian authorities to act like "a responsible country." Saeed is considered the founder of both groups.

"The Indian leadership is using Pakistan as a punching bag to cover its failures at home," Saeed told the Outlook magazine in an interview released Friday. "Instead of blaming Pakistan, India should have acted as a responsible country, shown patience and focused on investigating the attacks to find out the real culprits."

"I can say with authority," he continued, "that the Lashkar does not believe in killing civilians."

The interview was conducted in Lahore on Wednesday with the magazine's foreign editor, Aijaz Ashraf.

Kasab told police that a senior Lashkar leader, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the group's operations chief, recruited him for the attack, and the assailants called another senior leader, Yusuf Muzammil, on a satellite phone before the attacks.

The information sent investigators back to another reputed Lashkar operative, Faheem Ansari.

Ansari, an Indian national, was arrested in February in north India carrying hand-drawn sketches of hotels, the train terminal and other sites that were later attacked in Mumbai, Amitabh Yash, director of the Special Task Force of the Uttar Pradesh police, said Thursday.

During his interrogation, Ansari also named Muzammil as his handler in Pakistan, adding that he trained in a Lashkar camp in Muzaffarabad -- the same area where Kasab said he was trained, a senior police officer involved in the investigation said.

In Pakistan, the Interior Ministry chief told reporters he had no immediate information on Lakhvi or Muzammil.

According to the U.S., Lakhvi has directed Lashkar operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and Southeast Asia, training members to carry out suicide bombings and attack populated areas. In 2004, he allegedly sent operatives and funds to attack U.S. forces in Iraq.