Pakistan Link to Mumbai Attack Questioned

As India continues to point the finger at neighboring Pakistan for a deadly terrorist attack in Mumbai that killed at least 172 people a week ago, government officials and security experts are urging patience in order to sort out truth from speculation.

India has accused Yusuf Muzammil, a senior leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, of coordinating the attack, The Wall Street Journal reported. A senior Mumbai police official told the newspaper that two days before the attack, the group of 10 terrorists who took hostages talked with terrorist group leaders via satellite phone. The group also underwent training in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, the official said.

Muzammil was on a list of 20 people India has asked Pakistan to extradite. Pakistani officials have promised to look into the alleged role of "nonstate actors," a phrase that usually refers to militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba. President Asif Ali Zardari pledged quick action against anyone proven to be involved. (The State Department has been reluctant to say whether Pakistan had a role in the attack, except to say a group at least partly based in the country is believed responsible, The Associated Press reports.)

(snip)

Steve Coll, writing for The New Yorker, noted that India will likely try to find evidence of direct state sponsorship by Pakistan in the attacks, but such evidence might be hard to come by.

more: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/12/pakistan_link_to_mumbai_attack.html?nav=rss_blog

The article focuses on the difficulty of finding court-room evidence to prove responsibility to court-room standards, and does not question the actual ties of the action to elements in the Pakistani 'special services'....

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2008/11/decoding-mumbai.html

There is so much ambiguity here, good to go over it carefully.