India law chief admits siege lapses

Source: Agencies  |   2008-12-6  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

INDIA'S top law enforcement official admitted yesterday there were government "lapses" in last week's terror attack on Mumbai, amid a public uproar over security and intelligence failures in the deadly siege.

"There have been lapses. I would be less than truthful if I said there had been no lapses," Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told reporters, saying he was seeking to bolster the country's security.

The assault on India's financial capital left 171 dead and 239 wounded. Chidambaram, only days in the post after the previous minister was ousted after the attacks, made the acknowledgment as new details surfaced that a Pakistani militant group had used an Indian operative as far back as 2007 to scout targets in the Mumbai plot.

Indian officials have accused Pakistani-based extremists in the November 26 to 29 attacks, an assertion echoed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh yesterday.

"The territory of a neighboring country has been used for perpetrating this crime," Singh said after meeting visiting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. "We expect the international community to wake up and recognize that terror anywhere and everywhere constitutes a threat to world peace and prosperity."

The surviving gunman, Ajmal Amir Kasab, 21, told interrogators he had been sent by the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and identified two of the plot's masterminds, according to two government officials.

The information sent investigators back to another reputed Lashkar operative, Faheem Ansari.

Ansari, an Indian national, 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, Amitabh Yash, director of the Special Task Force of the Uttar Pradesh police, said.

Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, Lashkar's leader, said in an interview that his group was not involved in the attacks and called on Indian authorities to act like "a responsible country."

"The Indian leadership is using Pakistan as a punching bag to cover its failures at home," Saeed told Outlook magazine in an interview released yesterday. "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."