MUMBAI, India — The only gunman captured after a 60-hour terrorist siege of Mumbai said he belonged to a Pakistani militant group with links to the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, a senior police officer said Sunday.
The gunman was one of 10 who paralyzed the city in an attack that killed at least 174 people and revealed the weakness of India’s security apparatus. India’s top law enforcement official resigned, bowing to growing criticism that the attackers appeared better trained, better coordinated and better armed than police.
The announcement blaming militant group Lashkar- e-Taiba threatened to escalate tensions between India and Pakistan. Lashkar, long seen as a creation of the Pakistani intelligence service to help fight India in disputed Kashmir, was banned in Pakistan in 2002.
A spokesman for Pakistani President Asif Zardari dismissed the claim.
“We have demanded evidence of the complicity of any Pakistani group. No evidence has yet been provided,” said spokesman Farhatullah Babar.
Authorities were still removing bodies from the bullet- and grenade-scarred Taj Mahal hotel, a day after commandos finally ended the violence that began Wednesday night. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised to strengthen maritime and air security and look into creating a new federal investigative agency.
Officials said local police were not trained or equipped to cope with such attacks. With no SWAT team in this city of 18 million, authorities called in the only unit in the country trained to deal with such crises. But the National Security Guards, which largely devotes its resources to protecting top officials, is based outside of New Delhi, and it took the commandos nearly 10 hours to reach the scene.
And even those commandos lacked equipment such as night-vision goggles and thermal sensors that would have aided in the search for hostages.
President Bush on Sunday dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi. Rice was to leave Sunday night for a meeting in London and then travel to Brussels, Belgium, for a NATO gathering. On Wednesday, she will travel to New Delhi, White House press secretary Dana Perino said.
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