Looks like the Pakis were behind it all

The New York Times has an article by Robert Worth and Graham Bowley about the Mumbai attackers:

The Indian police said for the first time on Tuesday that all of the Mumbai attackers came by ship from the Pakistani port of Karachi, offering the most specific evidence to date of a Pakistani link to the attacks. The allegations, made by the chief of the Mumbai police in a televised news conference, came as the Indian foreign minister appeared to rule out an immediate military response against Pakistan, saying that “no one is talking about military action", according to news reports. But the Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, increased pressure on Pakistan, demanding that the Pakistani government arrest and hand over about twenty people wanted for seven years under Indian law as criminal fugitives and who he said were still at large in Pakistan.
The request was the first known concrete demand made by India on Pakistan since the bloody rampage last week during which at least 173 people were killed. The fugitives, some of whom were suspected gangsters with links to organized crime, are not believed to be linked directly to the latest attacks in Mumbai, and the request for their handover — made by India before — may be a sign that it is trying to take advantage of the atmosphere since the attacks to win new concessions.
With tensions high between Islamabad and New Delhi, the Mumbai police chief, Hassan Gafoor, gave some of the most specific details yet about the identity of the attackers and the nature of their assault, saying that the one gunman the police had captured alive was from Pakistan. “The one we captured is from Pakistan,” he said. He said the police were still verifying the nationalities of the nine other attackers, all of whom were killed during their rampage. But he said there had been no British passport holders among them, contradicting earlier news reports. He said the ten had been trained by an ex-army officer, although he refused to specify which army the officer belonged to, and he said the attackers had all been trained in the same location, some for as long as a year, although he would not say where the training took place. “The main plan was obvious — to create a sensation and to kill as many people as possible,” he told reporters at a televised news conference, referring to the motivation behind the attacks on Mumbai, India’s financial capital.
Responding to questions about whether the teh gunmen had received assistance, he said the evidence suggested they had no collaboration from employees at the two hotels they attacked in Mumbai, and there was as yet no evidence they had help elsewhere in the city.
The Associated Press reported that the Bush administration had warned India before the attacks that terrorists appeared to be plotting a mostly waterborne assault on Mumbai, quoting a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of intelligence information.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was due to arrive in the region on Wednesday to demand Pakistan’s full cooperation with the investigation into the attacks and to calm relations. In an attempt to tamp down tensions between India and Pakistan ahead of Ms. Rice’s arrival, President Bush ordered Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to travel to India.
As the Indian investigation increasingly pointed to some involvement by groups based in Pakistan, the demand for the return of the twenty fugitives was made when India summoned Pakistan’s ambassador on Monday evening and told him that Pakistanis were responsible for the terrorist attacks here last week and must be punished.
“We have in our demarche asked for the arrest and handover of those persons who are settled in Pakistan and who are fugitive of Indian law,” Mr. Mukherjee told reporters in New Delhi on Tuesday. A list of about twenty names was handed over to the Pakistani envoy in the diplomatic protest, he said. Indeed, in his news briefing, the police chief, Hassan Gafoor, said there was “so far no” evidence that the terrorists in the latest attacks had any link to organized crime.
Facing public anger directed against both the Indian government and Pakistan, officials of India’s Foreign Ministry suggested that the planners of the attacks were still at large in Pakistan, and that they expected “strong action would be taken” by Pakistan against those responsible for the violence, according to a statement released by the ministry. Nine of the ten men who appear to have carried out the attacks are now dead; the remaining one is in custody. The statement added tartly that Pakistan’s actions “needed to match the sentiments expressed by its leadership that it wishes to have a qualitatively new relationship with India".
But in a sign of restrained rhetoric between the two countries, Mr. Mukherjee later said in New Delhi, that, “No one is talking about military action,” although he still insisted that “every sovereign country has its right to protect its territorial integrity", and was quoted as saying it was difficult for India to continue the current peace process with Pakistan after the assaults, which killed 173. In an initial response, Pakistan seemed eager to lower the levels of easily-ignited passion that, in the past, have brought the two nuclear-armed neighbors into three wars. The Pakistan foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, offered in a televised address to conduct a joint investigation with India into the Mumbai killings, and said now was not the time for a “blame game". “Pakistan wants good relations with India,” he said. Pakistani officials have said that they are not aware of any links to Pakistan-based militants, and that they would act swiftly if they found one. Many of the fugitives sought by India were people it has been trying to arrest for years. They included Dawood Ibrahim, described in news reports as a powerful gangster and India’s most-wanted fugitive, who was accused of organizing bombings in Mumbai in 1993. The list also included Masood Azhar, a suspected terrorist freed from prison in India in exchange for the release of hostages aboard a hijacked Indian Airlines aircraft in December of 1999.
President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan said in a television interview Monday night that if India shared the results of its investigation, Pakistan would “do everything in our power to go after these militants.” American and Indian intelligence officials said there was strong evidence tying the attacks to militants inside Pakistan. According to senior American government officials, satellite intercepts of telephone calls made during the siege directly linked the attackers in Mumbai to operatives in Pakistan working for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Islamist group accused of carrying out terrorist attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and elsewhere. The same group has been mentioned by some European security officials as linked to the attack. The American officials said there was still no evidence that Pakistan’s government had a hand in the operation.
The Indian government is facing strong criticism at home for its handling of the attacks, in which 173 people were killed over three bloody days here in the country’s financial capital. (The authorities revised the number downward on Monday, saying that some names had been counted twice.) With elections just months away, the government needs to be seen as acting decisively in the face of the atrocities. But it could be accused of raising a red herring if it does not furnish convincing evidence for its claims of Pakistani involvement.
There is also a groundswell of popular anger here aimed at Pakistan, and the attacks have raised tensions between the countries to a level not seen since 2001, when a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament pushed them to the brink of war.
The ominous atmosphere poses a special challenge for the United States, a strong ally of India that also depends on Pakistan for cooperation in fighting al-Qaeda. Renewed tensions between India and Pakistan could distract Pakistan from that project.
Speaking in London on Monday, Ms. Rice called on Pakistan in blunt terms “to follow the evidence wherever it leads", adding, “I don’t want to jump to any conclusions on this, but I do think that this is a time for complete, absolute, total transparency and cooperation.”
India’s assertion that the attackers were all Pakistani echoes a claim by the one attacker who was captured, identified as Ajmal Amir Qasab, said Rakesh Maria, joint commissioner of the Mumbai police, in a news conference. Mr. Qasab also said he was a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Mr. Maria said. However, no foreign identification documents were found, and some of the attackers had fake Indian papers, he added. Inspector Maria also said there were only ten attackers in all, denying earlier suggestions by public officials that there had been more. However, it remains unclear whether the attackers had at least some accomplices on the ground before the violence began on Wednesday night.
Some new details emerged about the difficulties faced by the Indian police commandos who responded to the killings here last week. The attackers used grenades to booby trap some of the bodies in the two luxury hotels where they struck, the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower and the Oberoi, so they would explode when they were moved, Inspector Maria said. It was not always clear, he added, whether the people were dead or just wounded. That tactic made fighting the attackers more difficult, and significantly delayed the cleanup after the violence ended, Inspector Maria said. The last militants were routed on Saturday morning, but the Taj hotel was not returned to the control of its owners until Monday morning. But those details seemed unlikely to blunt the rising public anger at the government’s handling of the attacks, which have been widely described here as India’s 9/11. The ease with which the small band of attackers mowed down civilians in downtown Mumbai, and then repelled police commandos for days in several different buildings, has exposed glaring weaknesses in India’s intelligence and enforcement abilities.
Indian intelligence officials issued at least one warning about a possible attack on the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, but that was in September. Security was increased for a while and then relaxed, intelligence officials said. There were reports of many other unheeded warnings, but it was not clear how many were actually communicated.
On Monday, the rising public outcry pushed Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is located, to offer his resignation. He is a member of the governing Congress Party, and party leaders were still considering his offer Monday night. “I accept moral responsibility for the terror attacks,” he said at a news conference. Earlier in the day, his deputy, R. R. Patil, officially stepped down. The two gestures came a day after India’s highest-ranking domestic security official, Home Minister Shivraj Patil, resigned, saying he took responsibility for the failure to forestall or quickly contain the killing rampage.
Also on Monday, mourners attended a memorial service for a Jewish couple who were murdered at Nariman House, a Jewish outreach center the terrorists took over during their bloody rampage. The couple’s orphaned 2-year-old son, Moshe Holtzberg, cried out for his parents, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, from Brooklyn, and his wife, Rivka, 28, an Israeli. The boy, carrying a small orange inflatable basketball, first cried “Dada” and then inconsolably “Ima,” which means mother in Hebrew, as he accompanied his grieving grandparents and dignitaries, including Israel’s ambassador to India, Mark Sofer, at the synagogue service. “The house they built here in Mumbai will live with them,” said Shimon Rosenberg, Rivka’s father, his voice breaking. “They were the mother and father of the Jewish community in Mumbai.”
The new home minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, the former finance chief, briefly addressed reporters on Monday, promising to respond vigorously to the terrorist threat. “This is the threat to the very idea of India, the very soul of India, the India that we know, the India that we love — namely a secular, plural, tolerant, and open society,” he said. “I have no doubt in my mind that ultimately the idea of India will triumph.”

Rico says he has no doubt that the 'idea of India' will survive, but he would not be surprised if India and Pakistan have another little war over this... (And that the Israelis help.)