Official Recognition on Mumbai Attack Is Concession to India By ZAHID HUSSAIN in Islamabad and MATTHEW ROSENBERG in New Delhi
Pakistan publicly acknowledged for the first time Thursday that last year's terrorist attack on Mumbai was partly planned on its soil and said it had arrested most of the key plotters, the clearest sign yet that Pakistan intends to cooperate with international efforts to prosecute those behind the attacks.
Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik's announcement appeared to mark a break from Pakistan's equivocation over the role of its people in the attacks. While India and the U.S. urged Islamabad to take responsibility, some Pakistani officials had suggested the plot was hatched elsewhere.
"Some part of the conspiracy has taken place in Pakistan," Mr. Malik said. "I want to assure our nation, I want to assure the international community, that we mean business."
Detailing a strong Pakistani link to the three-day rampage in November, Mr. Malik said six people have been charged in Pakistan with "abetting, conspiracy and facilitation" of a terrorist act, and several other suspected plotters are in Pakistani custody or under investigation.
India's Foreign Ministry called Pakistan's statement "a positive development" and said it would share whatever additional information it could.
That was a marked change from the accusatory tone New Delhi has taken with Islamabad since the attacks on luxury hotels, a Jewish center and other targets left 171 people dead, including nine assailants.
Officials in Washington have pushed Pakistan to conduct a thorough investigation and offer a complete, public accounting of what they found.
Mr. Malik's statements may have come under U.S. pressure or been timed as a gesture to the U.S.; his news conference came on the heels of a visit by Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
WSJ's Nik Deogun discusses the significance of Pakistan's recent admission that last year's attack on Mumbai was largely planned on its soil and that it had arrested most of the key plotters. However, he tells colleague Adam Najberg there are still questions to be answered. More
"Pakistan knows the entire international community is watching and wants to see justice," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood. He called reports of the arrests "a very positive step."
Mr. Malik said his investigators had tracked down safe houses and hideouts used by the conspirators, traced the boats that carried the attackers from a seaside Pakistani town to the waters outside Mumbai, and found the store in the Arabian Sea port of Karachi that sold the engines used to power the dinghies that carried the 10 gunmen ashore.
"The boats that were used by the terrorists to reach Mumbai are under our possession," he said. He added that authorities have also taken into custody the crews that sailed them.
Mr. Malik described a plot that used the global communications network to mask its origins. Some of the mobile-phone SIM cards were from Austria and India, Internet phone calls were made with an account paid for in Barcelona, and a satellite phone was purchased in the Middle East.
The suspects being held include at least one Pakistani who was living Barcelona. "Don't ask how I brought him to Pakistan," Mr. Malik said. "He was lured to come here." Spain's Interior Ministry said it had no information about the arrest and has asked Pakistan for information.
In Pakistan, Mr. Malik said authorities were able to trace and arrest "one of the main operators" -- a man he said was named Hamman Sadiq -- by sifting through records of bank transfers and telephone calls.
Mr. Malik said some alleged plotters were linked to the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, the outfit U.S. and Indian officials say was behind the attacks.
Among those "under investigation," according to Mr. Malik, is Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the group's operational commander and the alleged mastermind of the attacks. Mr. Lakhvi was detained in a crackdown on Lashkar in December along with Zarar Shah, Lashkar's communications chief.
Mr. Malik didn't address Indian accusations that elements of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which once had close ties to Lashkar, played a role in plotting the attack. Pakistan has arrested much of Lashkar's leadership.
Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund will begin a review of Pakistan's economic performance Sunday. Pakistan received $3.1 billion of a $7.6 billion IMF rescue package in November and is expecting a $750 million installment after the review, a Pakistani official said. —Haris Zamir, Thomas Catan and Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.
Inspirational ...a rally near New Delhi for Mayawati Kumari in the lead-up to the Indian election. Photo: A.P.
An 'untouchable' may soon hold the balance of power, writes Amelia Gentleman.
ON THE wall of his office, Indian sculptor Shravan Prajapati has nailed a typed list of exacting instructions from his most important client.
The specifications will guide him as he begins work on the most ambitious statute of his career: a 15-metre bronze monument of a woman in triumphal pose.
That woman is Mayawati Kumari, a diminutive former schoolteacher whose supporters believe may soon hold the balance of power in the world's biggest democracy. So confident is she of victory in India's general election that she has already commissioned Mr Prajapati to start work on the enormous statue she plans to install in Delhi if she is named prime minister.
This confidence is not shared by many outside her party and with results announced next Saturday, there is little certainty about which parties and individuals are ahead in the polls. But no one doubts the size of her long-term ambition or the crucial power-broking role her party will play in the new government.
As Chief Minister of India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, Ms Mayawati, 52, already controls a region of 190 million people.
Born a Dalit (the preferred term for what was once known as an Untouchable) in a Delhi slum, she has defied deep-rooted prejudice throughout her career. Unmarried, she is one of the few women in India to claim power in her own right, and not as a daughter or a widow.
Her supporters cast her as a symbol of hope for India's 160 million Dalits, and for other low-caste, oppressed members of society. They compare her journey from the lowest rung of society to a position of national power to the rise of Barack Obama.
India's election is widely expected to end in messy compromise, with no one party able to command a majority. Uttar Pradesh has more seats than any other state in India's 543-member parliament, and Ms Mayawati's party, the Bahujan Samaj Party (the BSP - Party of the Majority of Society) is fielding more than 400 candidates.
If she wins enough seats, her party's support could be so crucial to the Congress Party or the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party as they scrabble together a coalition of allies that the prime ministership is offered to her in exchange.
Uttar Pradesh is scattered with statues of Ms Mayawati. They are at the centre of a cult of personality that Ms Mayawati has nurtured since she become Chief Minister for the fourth time in 2007. Commentators have remarked with growing disquiet on the combined cost of this and other self-aggrandising ventures - most notably the 50-hectare Ambedkar Park that is being completed in Lucknow city centre. It is paved entirely with highly polished marble and dotted with elephant statues, red sandstone-domed buildings and rows of marble pillars, each topped with more bronze elephants.
Mr Prajapati, who comes from what is known in officialese as a "backward caste", shrugs off the criticism, arguing that the aim is to honour the achievements of India's most oppressed communities. "Dalits worship her as a goddess, as someone who has come to free them from the misery into which they were born," a commentator said.
Ms Mayawati's popularity with India's Dalits appears to be based more on her inspirational achievements than on her questionable record on uplifting a community which remains downtrodden despite the existence of 60-year-old legislation outlawing caste discrimination. She is not embarrassed about flaunting the symbols of her success - mansions, cars, helicopters - and does not pitch herself as one of the people.
Her party has not published a manifesto, and her political vision is ill-defined. In the past she has forged alliances with parties crossing the spectrum, and she is now tied to high-caste groups as well as groups from the centre and the right.
Her behaviour has bemused many who were initially impressed by her. "When she won in 2007, and I saw men crawling like worms at her feet, I was pleased that a woman should have got to this position of power," Kulsum Talha, a Lucknow-based journalist, said. "She is very, very capable - it is just that she has not used her talents well. All this building work is sheer madness in a poor state like UP. The same money could have been used to uplift Dalits in other, more practical ways."
For many, her extravagance and ability to stockpile wealth form part of her appeal. "The more she fortresses herself from her people, the more they cleave to her," a report in the weekly news magazine Tehelka concluded last week. "She is the symbol of what they can be. The more ostentatious her image, the greater their glee."
Rahul Gandhi, the Congress Party MP whose family and party were very powerful in Uttar Pradesh until Ms Mayawati's party captured the Dalit vote, accused her of wasting money intended for pro-Dalit schemes.
Ms Mayawati responded in a speech to a BSP rally, claiming the Congress-led central government never delivered the money for the Dalit programs, and adding that, nationwide, there had been few real improvements in the lives of Dalits in the six decades since independence.
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