Suspects in the July 11 serial bombings of a commuter train network here have acknowledged having gone to Pakistan for training in arms and explosives, senior police officials in India said on Friday.
At least one suspect has testified that he received instructions from an operative of a banned terrorist organization operating across the border, the officials said.
The statements by the officials represent the first evidence of complicity by the Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which Indian officials have repeatedly blamed for terrorist attacks on Indian soil. The chief of the Mumbai Police Antiterrorist Squad, K.P. Raghuvanshi, said six of the eight suspects had said they went to Pakistan for military training.
PHOTO: AFP
The police have not described precisely how the eight men are linked to each other, nor how they are linked to the commuter train blasts, which killed 183 people during the evening rush hour.
The Pakistani Foreign Office spokeswoman, Tasnim Aslam, said by telephone from Islamabad, the capital, that her government had offered to cooperate with the investigation into the bombings, but had yet to receive evidence from New Delhi.
"If they have something, they should share it with us, and we will cooperate with them," she said, noting that Britain and the US had turned to Pakistan to help track down terrorism suspects.
From New Delhi, the Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Navtej Sarna, said no evidence offered to Pakistan in the past had yielded results.
What effect the statements by the police will have on the bruised peace effort between the two countries remains unclear. Shortly after the bombings, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India accused Pakistan of failing to rein in terrorists operating on its soil. The Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, called the accusation "unsubstantiated."
A senior police inspector, J.K. Hargude, who interviewed five of the eight suspects, described them as having possible links to Lashkar-e-Taiba. Among them is an apparently influential leader of Lashkar's local chapter in Mumbai, Faisal Shaikh, 30, and his younger brother, Muzamil, 23, a software engineer who, the police said, had recently sought a job with the US software company Oracle.
Faisal Shaikh, the police said, appeared to have organized the passage of the others to Pakistan for military training. Muzamil Shaikh, on the other hand, while keen to follow his brother into the arms of a radical Islamist group, seems to have had second thoughts after being offered a position at Oracle. He had been employed on a contract basis, said a police officer who was part of the interrogations, pending the completion of company training.
"He was very hopeful of a good career," said the officer, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press. Both Muzamil and Faisal Shaikh traveled to Pakistan through Iran, the police said.
The brothers were arrested on Thursday after the capture of six others, including Zameer Shaikh, 31,from central Mumbai; Sohail Shaikh, 30, from Pune, a nearby city; and Tanvir Ansari, 32.
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