Residents of India Blame Pakistan and Their Own Leaders for Attack

The one gunman who was captured alive is from Pakistan, but the investigation into the deadly attack is just beginning. 

Deadly attack

	News of the attacks spread quickly on television and on the Internet, and coverage continued as terrorists took control of several buildings in Mumbai.

The highly-trained militants took police – who are mostly either unarmed or carry bamboo sticks - off guard.

It took two days for a full contingent of Indian special operations soldiers to get to Mumbai -- no planes were available to transport them -- and take the buildings back by killing all but one of the gunmen.

Weak response

	Indians criticized their government for the response to the attacks. Maharashtra state Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh offered to resign over the response.

Mumbai has been the target of a series of attacks recently including one in 2006 on the mass transport system that killed 219.

On one Indian news program, a panel of prominent Mumbai residents vented their anger.

"We have not been done in by terrorists. We have been done in by incompetent politicians," one resident said.

Several Indian officials, including its top domestic security official, have resigned over the government's response to the attack.

Who did it?

	Although the identities of the terrorists have not been determined, this snapshot of the Mumbai attackers shows that they were young men.

Qasab said he trained with Pakistani Islamic militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is a right-wing Sunni orthodox group that was at one time fostered by the Pakistani Intelligence Service to help in the fight over the disputed area of Kashmir.

But the group has become broader and harder to control, according to Shuja Nawaz, a former Pakistani journalist.

"Many of the members of this group and its offshoots are now seen as franchisees of al-Qaida and the Taliban and have been seen operating in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan," Nawaz said on the NewsHour.

Pakistan banned the group six years ago after the United States and Britain labeled it as a terrorist organization.
Qasab told investigators that he and the other terrorists, aged 18 to 28 years, received extensive training in navigation, sea survival skills and combat for 6 months.

Investigators are also looking into whether they received any support from residents of Mumbai.

Neighbor problems

	The contested Kashmir territory in between India and Pakistan has been a point of conflict since the partition during the 1940s.

America’s interest

	President-elect Barack Obama said that America would stand with India against terrorism.