Rice bids to defuse tension over Indian attacks

The gunmen who attacked Mumbai set out by boat from Pakistan’s port of Karachi, a top police official said, as the US secretary of state headed today to India in Washington’s efforts to defuse tension between the two nuclear rivals.

As evidence of the militants’ links to Pakistan mounted, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to arrive in New Delhi as part of the US effort to ensure Islamabad cooperates in the investigation and to ease any antagonism in the region.

Mumbai police commissioner Hasan Ghafoor said yesterday that ex-Pakistani army officers trained the group – some for up to 18 months – and denied reports that the men had been planning to escape the city.

“It appears that it was a suicide attack,” Mr Ghafoor said, providing no other details about when the gunmen left Karachi, or when they hijacked the trawler.

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

The official would not elaborate on the timing or details of the US warning.

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 neighbour 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.

Yesterday, US officials also pointed the finger at Pakistani-based groups, although they did not specifically mention Lashkar by name.

US National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell said the same group that carried out last week’s attack is believed to be behind the Mumbai trains bombings that killed more than 200 two years ago.

While Mr McConell did not identify the group by name, the Indian government has attributed the 2006 attack to Lashkar and the Students Islamic Movement of India.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said extremists were “apparently targeting Americans and Britons, but the truth is that most of those who were attacked were Indians.”

Mr Gates also told a Pentagon news conference that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, was headed to the region.

Of greater concern for India was the apparent failure to act on multiple warnings ahead of the Mumbai attacks, which Indian navy chief Sureesh Mehta called “a systemic failure”.