Mumbai attacks: US intelligence warned India a strike from Pakistani group was planned

[tekisui]

Two warnings were passed on in the last month. But the attacks last week caught the Indian security services offguard, allowing the 10 gunmen who attacked a handful of prominent targets to entrench their positions at the outset of the 60-hour battle.

"The United States warned the Indian government about a potential maritime attack against Mumbai at least a month before last week's massacre in Mumbai," a US counter-terrorism official told CNN.

A political row has broken out in India over reports that Indian intelligence also intercepted a telephone call on Nov 18, indicating that an attack on the commercial capital was planned.

The military and civil security services failed to act on the warnings. National and state security ministers have been forced by a public outcry to tender their resignations.

India demanded Pakistan hand over its most wanted men as sign of faith as diplomatic efforts to prevent the nuclear-armed rivals from heading toward a confrontation over the Mumbai attacks.

New Delhi renewed a demand Pakistan hand over 20 militants wanted in India, including Hafeez Sayeed, the chief of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group which has become the focus of investigations into the Mumbai attacks that killed 188 people.

Others on the list include Dawood Ibrahim, a Mumbai underworld don blamed for bomb blasts in the city in 1993 that killed 260 people and Maulana Masood Azhar, a militant cleric who was arrested in India and then freed in 1999 in exchange for the freedom of passengers on an Indian Airlines flight hijacked and flown to Kandahar in Afghanistan.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/3541587/Mumbai-attacks-US-intelligence-warned-India-a-strike-from-Pakistani-group-was-planned.html