Jane Perlez and Robert F. Worth
Fresh evidence unearthed Thursday by investigators in India indicated that the Mumbai attacks were stage-managed from Pakistan by top leaders of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Indian and American intelligence officials have already identified Lashkar operative Yusuf Muzammil as a mastermind of the attacks. On Thursday, Indian investigators named senior Lashkar figure Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. Both men were in contact with their charges as they sailed to Mumbai from Karachi, and then continued guiding the attacks as they unfolded, directing the assaults.
Deven Barthi, a deputy commissioner on the Mumbai police force, said the weapons used in the attacks came from a factory in Punjab province in Pakistan that is under contract to the Pakistani military. The attackers left a trail of evidence in a satellite phone they left behind on a hijacked fishing trawler, which contained the telephone numbers of Muzammil, Lakhvi and a number of other Lashkar operatives.
Some of the six people killed at Habad house in Mumbai had been treated particularly savagely, the police said, with bodies bearing what appeared to be strangulation marks and other wounds that did not come from gunshots or grenades. The Washington Post reported that Rakesh Maria, India's joint commissioner of police, said Thursday that the bodies of those killed at the Jewish center showed they were "beaten badly. There was heavy assault there."
(New York Times)
