Lashkar commander confesses to role in 26/11

New York: Top Lashkar-e-Toiba commander Zarar Shah captured in the crackdown on terrorists earlier this month in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir, has confessed the group's involvement in terror attacks in Mumbai, a media report said on Wednesday.

Shah also implicated other LeT members, and had broadly confirmed the confession made by the sole captured terrorist Ajmal Kasab to Indian investigators – that the 10 assailants trained in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and then went by boat from Karachi to Mumbai, the Wall Street Journal reported quoting a senior Pakistani security official.

The paper said Pakistan's own investigation of terror attacks in Mumbai have begun to show substantive links between the LeT and 10 gunmen who took part in the Mumbai mission.

Pakistani security officials were also quoted as saying that a top Lashkar commander, Zarar Shah, has admitted a role in the Mumbai attack during interrogation.

The paper quoted a person familiar with investigation as saying that Shah also admitted that the attackers spent at least a few weeks in Karachi, training in urban combat to hone skills they would use in their assault.

The disclosure, it said, could add new international pressure on Pakistan to accept that the attacks, which left 183 dead in India, originated within its borders and to prosecute or extradite the suspects.

That raises difficult and potentially destabilising issues for the country's new civilian government, its military and the spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence – which is conducting interrogations of terrorists it once cultivated as partners, the Wall Street Journal said.

“He is singing,” the security official said of Shah.

The admission, the official told the paper, is backed up by US intercepts of a phone call between Shah and one of the attackers at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, the site of a 60-hour confrontation with the Indian security forces.

A second person familiar with the investigation was quoted by WSJ as saying that Shah told Pakistani interrogators that he was one of the key planners of the operation, and that he spoke with the attackers during the rampage to give them advice and keep them focused.

Shah, the paper said, was picked up along with fellow Lashkar commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi during the military camp raids in PoK.

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The probe, the Journal said, also is stress-testing an uncomfortable shift under way at Pakistan's spy agency – and the government – since the election of civilian leadership replacing the military-led regime earlier this year.

Military and intelligence officials, it says, acknowledge they have long seen India as their primary enemy and Islamist extremists such as Lashkar as allies.

But now the ISI is in the midst of being revamped, and its ranks purged of those seen as too soft on Islamic terrorists.

That revamp and the Mumbai attacks are in turn putting pressure on the civilian leadership, which risks a backlash among the population – and among elements of ISI and the military – if it is too accommodating to India.

"The ISI can make or break any regime in Pakistan," retired General Mirza Aslam Beg, a former army chief, was quoted as saying. "Don't fight the ISI."

The delicate politics of the Mumbai investigation, the WSJ said, have given the spy agency renewed sway just when the government was trying to limit its influence. A Western diplomat told the paper that the question now is what Pakistan will do with the evidence it is developing.