Mumbai mastermind caught in Kashmir

Source: Agencies  |   2008-12-9  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

SECURITY forces overran a militant camp on the outskirts of Pakistani Kashmir's main city and seized an alleged mastermind of the attacks that shook India's financial capital last month, two officials said yesterday.

The raid was the first known response to demands by India and the United States that Pakistan target the alleged perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks, which have sharply raised tensions between South Asia's two nuclear-armed powers.

Backed by a helicopter, the troops grabbed Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi among at least 12 people taken on Sunday in the raid on the riverbank camp run by the banned group Laskhar-e-Taiba in Pakistani Kashmir. There was a brief gunfight in the camp near Muzaffarabad before the militants were subdued, the officials said.

Indian officials say the sole Mumbai attacker captured alive has told them that Lakhvi recruited him for the mission and that Lakhvi and another militant, Yusuf Muzammil, planned the operation. The three-day siege of India's commercial capital left 171 people dead.

Analysts say Lashkar-e-Taiba was created with the help of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in the 1980s to act as a proxy fighting force in Indian Kashmir. The US says the group has links to al-Qaida. In May, the US Department of the Treasury alleged that Lakhvi directed Laskhar-e-Taiba operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and Southeast Asia. In 2004, he allegedly sent operatives and funds to attack US forces in Iraq, it said.

It was not immediately clear what Pakistan intended to do with Lakhvi.

Pakistan and India do not have an extradition treaty. Last week, President Asif Ali Zardari indicated anyone arrested in Pakistan in connection with the attacks would be tried in Pakistan.