Indian authorities say terrorists cleared from landmark hotel

Indian troops said they had cleared Mumbai's Taj Mahal hotel of terrorists and begun to remove bodies and hostage from the building.

Among the dead were at least one Briton, Australian and Japanese national, an official at the Maharashtra state Home Ministry said.

Officials at Bombay Hospital said a Japanese man had died at the hotel and nine Europeans had been admitted, three of them in critical condition with gunshots. All had come from the Taj Mahal, the officials said.

Gunmen also seized the Mumbai headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Jewish outreach group Chabad Lubavitch. Indian commandos surrounded the building this morning and witnesses said gunfire was heard from the building.

The Indian navy said it was boarding a cargo ship suspected of being connected to the Mumbai attacks.

A navy spokesman said the MV Alpha, had recently arrived in Mumbai from Karachi, Pakistan.

He said the navy had “located the ship and now we are in the process of boarding it and searching it.”

Teams of gunmen stormed two hotels, a popular restaurant, hospitals and a crowded station in co-ordinated attacks across India’s financial capital - formerly known as Bombay – yesterday, killing at least 101 people and taking Westerners hostage.

A group of suspected Muslim militants have reportedly claimed responsibility.

Experts said the scale of the attacks on Mumbai was "unprecedented'' and noted that the closest comparison was Iraq, where co-ordinated bombings have killed more than 100 people in a single day.

Paul Wilkinson, emeritus professor of international relations at Britain's St Andrews University, said the terrorists’ choice of civilian targets and the interest in attacking Americans and Britons were “characteristic of the al-Qaida movement”.

He said: “India has been experiencing an escalation of jihadi-related terrorism in the last couple of years. This is certainly the worst manifestation of it.

“It is not a typical separatist event of the kind that you get in Assam and in other areas that have been in rebellion against the Indian state.

“This is a more generalised group with an ideology that appears to have something in common with al-Qaida.”