By MANIK BANERJEE - Associated | CALCUTTA, India – Indian police arrested two men accused of providing mobile phone cards to the gunmen in the Mumbai attacks, the first known arrests in the probe since the siege ended, police said Saturday.
 AP – People participate in a candle light vigil to pay tribute to those killed in recent terror attacks in … |
Shaim said one of the men was from West Bengal and the other was from the Indian portion of Kashmir.
Indian authorities believe the banned Pakistani-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has links to the disputed region of Kashmir, trained the gunmen and plotted the attacks.
The Kashmiri suspect was believed to be a local police officer, according to a police official in Srinagar, the region's biggest city, who declined to be named because the matter was still under investigation.
The men were arrested Friday night, but Shahim declined to offer further details. He was expected to speak to the press Saturday afternoon.
The arrests could represent further evidence of homegrown ties to the attacks, which would be a blow to Indian officials who have blamed the siege against 10 sites across Mumbai entirely on Pakistani extremists.
Earlier, police said they were investigating another Indian national, Faheem Ansari, who was arrested in February in north India carrying hand-drawn sketches of hotels, the train terminal and other sites that were later attacked in Mumbai. Authorities say Ansari was a Lashkar operative surveying south Mumbai for a future attack.
News of the February arrest has added to a torrent of criticism about missed warnings and botched intelligence.
The lone surviving gunman from the Mumbai attacks, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 21, is also in police custody.
Meanwhile, Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, India's top law enforcement official, apologized for "lapses" that allowed the gunmen to rampage through Mumbai.
"There have been lapses. I would be less than truthful if I said there had been no lapses," Chidambaram told reporters Friday.
The minister, who assumed his post just days ago following the ouster of the previous minister in the attack's aftermath, spoke as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pressed the assertion that Pakistani extremists were behind the attack.
"The territory of a neighboring country has been used for perpetrating this crime," Singh said Friday. "We expect the international community to wake up and recognize that terror anywhere and everywhere constitutes a threat to world peace and prosperity."
Kasab, the surviving gunman, told interrogators he had been sent by Lashkar and identified two of the plot's masterminds as being involved, two Indian government officials familiar with the inquiry said. Police had earlier identified the prisoner as Ajmal Amir Kasab.
Lashkar changed its name to Jamaat-ud-Dawa after it was banned in 2002 amid U.S. pressure, according to the U.S. State Department. The U.S. lists both groups as terrorist organizations.
Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, who heads Jamaat-ud-Dawa — though U.S. authorities in May described him as the overall leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba — denied in an interview that there was a Pakistani hand behind the attacks. He called on Indian authorities to act like "a responsible country." Saeed is considered the founder of both groups.
"The Indian leadership is using Pakistan as a punching bag to cover its failures at home," Saeed told Outlook magazine in an interview released Friday. "Instead of blaming Pakistan, India should have acted as a responsible country, shown patience and focused on investigating the attacks to find out the real culprits."
"I can say with authority," he continued, "that the Lashkar does not believe in killing civilians."
The interview was conducted in Lahore on Wednesday with the magazine's foreign editor, Aijaz Ashraf.
Kasab told police that a senior Lashkar leader, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the group's operations chief, recruited him for the attack, and that the assailants called another senior leader, Yusuf Muzammil, on a satellite phone before the attacks.
The information sent investigators back to Ansari, the reputed Lashkar operative arrested in February.
During his interrogation, Ansari also named Muzammil as his handler in Pakistan. He claimed to have trained in a Lashkar camp in Muzaffarabad — the same area where Kasab said he was trained, a senior police officer involved in the investigation said.
In Pakistan, the Interior Ministry chief told reporters he had no immediate information on Lakhvi or Muzammil.
According to the U.S., Lakhvi has directed Lashkar operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and Southeast Asia, training members to carry out suicide bombings and attack populated areas. In 2004, he allegedly sent operatives and funds to attack U.S. forces in Iraq.
Lashkar, outlawed by Pakistan in 2002, has been deemed a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaida by the U.S. The group has derived some of its funding from organizations based in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, with its leaders making fundraising trips to the Middle East in recent years, U.S. officials say.
Islamist charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa, accused by the U.S. of being the front group for Lashkar, has denied any connection to the attacks.
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