Pakistan denies role in India attack

MUMBAI, India – Pakistan demanded late Saturday that India produce evidence to support allegations that it was involved in the three-day assault on India’s financial and cultural capital, which came to a close earlier in the day.

Indian officials said they had killed or captured 10 gunmen responsible for the rampage through Mumbai, as authorities pulled more bodies from the wreckage of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel. Mourners marched in tearful funeral processions for some of the nearly 200 people killed in the attacks, which also targeted another hotel, a Jewish center and several other sites. Six Americans were among the dead, and hundreds were injured.

Indian intelligence officials said Saturday that the only surviving attacker was from Pakistan.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said his government was not involved. “If they have evidence, they should share it with us. Our hands are clean,” he said at a news conference in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. “We have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Pakistan warned that it would redeploy troops involved in the terrorism fight on its border with Afghanistan to its frontier with India in response to any Indian troop movements.

“Tension with India is mounting. The situation is very critical, and the next 48 hours are very crucial,” a senior Pakistani official said on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. He said Pakistan had put its air force and navy on high alert. “In case of any Indian aggression, Pakistan will respond to it in a matching way,” he said.

In Washington, U.S. intelligence officials said evidence continues to point to Islamist militants in Pakistan who have long sought to spark a war between Pakistan and India over the disputed Himalayan province of Kashmir. But the officials stressed that the investigation has barely gotten under way.

India and Pakistan have fought two wars over Kashmir, which both claimed after the 1947 partition of the subcontinent. Indian and Western intelligence officials have specifically cited Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based Islamist network founded to fight the Indian army in Kashmir, as a suspect in the attacks.

On Friday, Pakistan reversed a decision to send its spy chief to aid India’s investigation, saying it would send a lower-level official. But officials said they would help India identify and capture those behind the attacks.

Nationalistic pride has surged across India even as officials struggled to deal with accusations of a delayed government response to the crisis and poor coordination, especially at a Jewish center in Mumbai where five people were killed, including a rabbi, from New York, and his wife.

At a meeting in New Delhi, officials said they would station special commando forces in cities to expedite crisis response and emphasized the need for better coordination between the forces and local police.

“Now we are thinking about how to reduce the delay and get into action and not lose the golden hour,” M.L. Kumawat, special secretary of internal security, said at a news conference in New Delhi. “In the very near future, we will have such units at least in the big metropolitan cities. And in just a few hours, they will be able to mount an operation.”

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with security agencies Saturday and has called a meeting of all the political parties today to discuss an anti-terrorism plan.