Mumbai gunmen traveled from Pakistan

MUMBAI | The gunmen who attacked Mumbai set out by boat from the Pakistani port of Karachi, then later hijacked an Indian fishing trawler that carried them toward this financial capital on their suicide mission, a top police official said Tuesday.

As evidence of the militants’ links to Pakistan mounted, Mumbai Police Commissioner Hasan Ghafoor said ex-Pakistani army officers trained the group — some for up to 18 months — and denied reports the men had been planning to escape the city.

“It appears that it was a suicide attack,” Mr. Ghafoor said.

The revelations came as a senior U.S. official said India received a warning from the United States that militants were plotting a waterborne assault on Mumbai.

The Indian government is already facing intense public accusations of security and intelligence failures after suspected Muslim militants carried out the three-day attack across Mumbai last week, killing at least 172 people and wounding 239.

Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee also said his country gave a list of about 20 people — including India’s most-wanted man — to Pakistan’s high commissioner to New Delhi on Monday.

India stepped up the pressure on its neighbor after interrogating the only surviving attacker, who told police that he and the other nine gunmen had trained for months in camps in Pakistan operated by the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. On Tuesday, U.S. officials also pointed the finger at Pakistani-based groups, although they did not specifically mention Lashkar.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to arrive Wednesday, and the U.S. is pressuring Islamabad to cooperate in the investigation of the siege that paralyzed Mumbai and left six Americans dead.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said at a Pentagon news conference that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, also was headed to the region.

India’s foreign intelligence agency also had warnings as recently as September that Pakistan-based terrorists were plotting attacks on Mumbai, according to a government intelligence official familiar with the matter.

The information, intercepted from telephone conversations apparently coming out of Pakistan, indicated that hotels might be targeted but did not specify which ones, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the details.

India said evidence from the interrogation of the surviving attacker, Ajmal Qasab, pointed to Lashkar, which was outlawed in 2002 in Pakistan under U.S. pressure.

For the first time, the U.S. also said there is reason to suspect that the terror attacks were the work of a group at least partly based in Pakistan.

The remarks, from a senior State Department official, did not detail the evidence, and did not single out any terrorist organization, but they were the closest a U.S. official has come to laying blame for the assaults.

India has demanded that Pakistan take “strong action” against those responsible for the attacks. Mr. Mukherjee said military action was not being considered but later warned a peace process begun in 2004 was at risk if Pakistan did not act decisively.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi offered to establish a joint investigation with India and said the government wanted to continue a peace process begun in 2004 and broadened this year to include cooperation in fighting terrorism.

Topping India’s list of wanted men is Dawood Ibrahim, a powerful gangster and the purported mastermind of 1993 Mumbai bombings, India’s most deadly, which killed 257 people. Ibrahim fled to Dubai and later to Karachi. Pakistan has denied he is now in the country.

The other prime fugitive on the list is Masood Azhar, a suspected terrorist freed from an Indian prison in exchange for the release of hostages aboard an Indian jet hijacked to Afghanistan in 1999.