Indian authorities say this man, suspected of being a gunman in the Mumbai attack, claims he is Pakistani.
MUMBAI, India A second Indian official offered his
resignation Monday in the wake of last week's deadly terrorist attacks
as Pakistan urged its nuclear neighbor to withhold blame until further
investigation.
Vilasrao Deshmukh, chief minister of the state of Maharashtra where
Mumbai is located, said he would leave it up to his ruling Congress
party to decide whether his resignation would be accepted. His
announcement followed Sunday's resignation of federal Home Minister
Shivraj Patil, who quit amid criticism of the response to Wednesday's
attacks that left 179 dead. The attacks have damaged India's
already strained relationship with Pakistan, which says India has yet
to offer any proof to support allegations that a Pakistani-based
Islamic militant group was behind the massacre. One captured
suspect has told police that he is Pakistani, Indian officials said.
Sources told CNN's sister station, CNN-IBN, that the captive has said
he was trained by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a Pakistan-based terror group
allied with al Qaeda. The suspect also said he and his fellow attackers were told to memorize Google Earth maps of Mumbai's streets so they could find their targets, CNN-IBN reported.
But Rehman Malik, head of Pakistan's Interior Ministry, told CNN, "So far what has been shown has been unjust."
"If anybody has used our soil, I give assurance and I assure my friends
and people from India that we will take action," Malik said. In Washington, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States said the
attacks could be a chance to improve cooperation and ease "the burden
of history" between the longtime South Asian rivals, who have fought
three major wars since independence and conducted tit-for-tat nuclear
weapons tests in 1998. "It's important to avoid miscalculations.
It's important not to ratchet up tensions. It is important to
understand that this is an opportunity for India and Pakistan to work
together," Ambassador Husain Haqqani told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf
Blitzer" on Sunday. Police in Mumbai, located in Maharashtra
state, on Monday revised downward the death toll from Wednesday's
attacks and the sieges that followed to 179 dead and about 300 wounded. At least 28 foreigners were among the victims, including six Americans and eight Israelis.
The official death toll does not include at least nine gunmen killed in
three days of battles with police and the Indian military, police said
Monday. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh accepted the resignation
of Patil, the home minister, and immediately named Finance Minister P.
Chidambaram to take over the post, according to a source in the prime
minister's office. Patil, whose ministry oversees internal
security, had been accused of failing to improve intelligence before
the attacks, said N. Ram, editor-in-chief of The Hindu, a major Indian
newspaper. "This man has been widely criticized for not being up
to it and it was simply impossible that he could stay on after this,"
Ram said. Indian officials allege that in the 1990s,
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba was a state-sponsored terror group used by the
Pakistani government to get control of the disputed northern Kashmir
region. Pakistan banned the group in 2002, after an attack on India's
parliament that brought the two countries to the brink of war.
The Indian government is considering suspending the five-year old
cease-fire with Pakistan and perhaps even ending the dialogue process
with the country, CNN-IBN reported. Pakistani security
officials also told CNN that if tensions with India escalate, it may
shift its military forces from the Afghan border east to prepare for
any conflict. Pakistan's new democratic government, which took
office earlier this year, is battling its own insurgency along the
rugged border with Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO troops have been
fighting al Qaeda and Taliban militants since al Qaeda's 2001 attacks
on New York and Washington. Haqqani said the militants want India and Pakistan
to remain "at each other's throats so they can flourish," but he said
his government has seen no sign of an Indian buildup along the border.
"However, if there is any troop buildup on our eastern border, we will
certainly have to take defensive positions. And, unfortunately, that
may mean bringing troops from the western border," he said. "We don't
want it. We know India doesn't want it. And we know that the
international community doesn't want it." U.S. President George
Bush spoke to Singh on Sunday. Noting that U.S. citizens were among
those killed, the president "said that we would all be working
together, with the international community, to go after these
extremists," according to a statement from National Security Council
spokesman Gordon Johndroe. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice was scheduled to arrive in India on Wednesday in the wake of the
attacks, the White House said. Rice was scheduled to depart
Sunday night for an already scheduled trip to London, said Press
Secretary Dana Perino in a statement. Rice will attend a NATO meeting
on Tuesday before traveling to India, where she is expected to arrive
in New Delhi on Wednesday. Interpol had said it would send a
delegation to India to aid in the investigation. But on Sunday, the
international law enforcement agency was still waiting official
permission into the country, a spokesman said. The targets of
the attacks included luxury hotels packed with foreign tourists. The
105-year-old Taj Mahal hotel was the site of the attackers' final
stand, as gunmen held hostages and refused to leave the facility.
The chairman of the company that owns the hotel told CNN that the
company had been warned about the possibility of a terrorist attack
before the massacre. The hotel heightened security as a result,
the chairman of the Tata Group and Taj Hotels, Ratan Tata, said in a
taped interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN's "GPS." There were
indications, though, that the hotel relaxed security before the attack.
"It's ironic that we did have such a warning and we did have some
measures," Tata said. "People couldn't park their cars in the portico
where you had to go through a metal detector."
"But if I look at what we had -- which all of us complained about
-- it could not have stopped what took place. They didn't come through
that entrance," he said.
"They came from somewhere in the back. They planned everything," he
said of the attackers. "I believe the first thing they did, they shot a
sniffer dog and his handler. They went through the kitchen, they knew
what they were doing."
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