ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: Fresh evidence unearthed Thursday by investigators in India indicated that the Mumbai attacks were stage-managed from at least two Pakistani cities by top leaders of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Indian and American intelligence officials have already identified a Lashkar operative, who goes by the name Yusuf Muzammil, as a mastermind of the attacks. On Thursday, Indian investigators named one of the most well-known senior figures in Lashkar, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi.
The names of both men came from the interrogations of the one surviving attacker, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, according to police officials in Mumbai.
While Muzammil appears to have served as a control officer in Lahore, Pakistan, Lakhvi, his boss and the operational commander of Lashkar, worked from Karachi, a southern Pakistani port city, said investigators in Mumbai.
It now appears that both men were in contact with their charges as they sailed to Mumbai from Karachi, and then continued guiding the attacks even as they unfolded, directing the assaults and possibly providing information about the police and military response in India.(snip)
Deven Barthi, a deputy commissioner on the Mumbai police force, would not comment on Indian media reports claiming direct links between the ISI and the Mumbai attacks.
But, he said, "we have certain evidence of government complicity that we are trying to verify."
The weapons used in the attacks, he said, came from a factory based in Punjab Province in Pakistan that is under contract to the Pakistani military, he said.
The factory was also the source of grenades and explosives used in several earlier terrorist attacks in India, Barthi said. Those included bombings in Mumbai in 1993; a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in July, he said.
Investigators discovered the link to the Pakistan factory, Barthi said, after recovering a grenade left by the attackers that had EN ARGES printed on it.
That corresponds to a brand name belonging to a German company that granted a license to the factory to make weapons for the Pakistani military.(snip)
The gunmen also kept in contact with their handlers in Pakistan with cellphones as they rounded up guests at the two hotels, officials say.
The attackers left a trail of evidence in a satellite phone they left behind on the fishing trawler they hijacked near Karachi at the start of their 500-mile journey to Mumbai.
The phone contained the telephone numbers of Muzammil, Lakhvi and a number of other Lashkar operatives, according to a report on the Mumbai siege released Thursday by M. J. Gohel and Sajjan M. Gohel, two security analysts who direct the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London.
The numbers dialed on the phone found on the trawler used to call Muzammil matched the numbers on the cellphones recovered from the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the report says.
Based on evidence found on the trawler, it was possible that five other men were involved in the plot and were still at large, the report says.In one of the hotels, a gunman asked several Indian guests what caste they belonged to and what state they came from, said an official who interviewed the guests.
Once the attacker found out these details, he then called someone believed to be Muzammil, who was also identified by the surviving gunman and who was in Lahore, according to phone records recovered by investigators.
The surviving guests said the attacker told the person on the other end of the phone the guests' details and asked whether they should be killed or not.more....
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/asia/05mumbai.php
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