Investigation Underway as Assault in Mumbai Ends

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India Mourns as Assault in Mumbai Ends

Indian officials said Saturday that they had killed or captured 10 gunmen responsible for the three-day assault on India's financial and cultural capital. Nearly 200 people died in the attacks. The violence ended Saturday morning when government security forces, methodically searching the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel here, killed the last gunmen.

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"It was such a scary ordeal when you hear grenades going off and shooting outside your hotel room," said Philip Meyer, a French businessman who wheeled his luggage out of the besieged Oberoi hotel after the assault there ended on Friday and rubbed his eyes, bright pink from two days without sleep, before rushing into a taxi. "My two children were calling me nonstop. I was so scared."

Sanjay Vaswani, associate director of Kroll, a private risk assessment and security firm, said he was sending a flurry of text messages to high-level business clients who were trapped inside the Oberoi. Vaswani said he had been at the site for 48 hours. "We have never seen anything as drastic as this," he said, watching as a stream of freed hostages rushed onto buses. "We tried to be in minute-to-minute touch, telling them to stay down, don't do any sudden moves."

Mumbai Police Commissioner Hassan Ghafoor said that police teams had found at least 41 of the dead inside the Oberoi.

Indian officials told reporters that two of the gunmen were British citizens of Pakistani origin. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and other officials said that investigations were continuing.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi warned India not to "be jingoist" in making accusations about the attackers' origins, and said the two countries "are facing a common enemy, and we have to join hands to defeat this enemy."

Indian intelligence officials said the gunmen who launched the coordinated attacks appeared well trained and well prepared. The assailants seemed familiar with the layouts of the two hotels and the Jewish center, giving them a tactical advantage over the police and Indian army troops sent in to dislodge them.

"This is a big-scale operation, but it is not beyond the capability of Lashkar-i-Taiba," said the intelligence officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work. "The person we have caught is a foot soldier; he is from Pakistan's Punjab," the officer said, referring to a region divided by the India-Pakistan border.

"He has clearly said he is with Lashkar and that he was trained," the officer said. "They came via a ship. They hijacked a boat called Kuber, shot the man in charge on the boat. They were carrying a CD with the photographs of all the targets of the site, details. It is clear that they were determined to target India's iconic locations and deter foreign investment."

The Times of India, also citing police interrogation of a captured attacker, reported Saturday that several of the attackers had lived in Mumbai a few months ago, pretending to be students and conducted reconnaissance of the Oberoi and Taj hotels.

A December 2006 letter written by a Mumbai Intelligence Bureau official and obtained by The Post says that hundreds of operatives from Lashkar-i-Taiba had received maritime training.

Members of the group "are being trained to handle large boats, laying of mines in coastal zones and planting of explosives under dams, bridges, ships etc.," says the letter, which was marked "secret."

"[T]hey are being taught navigational techniques, rescue operations, surveillance methods, concealment of explosives and underwater attack on enemy's coastal targets/vessels," the letter says.