Officials quit over India attacks

Indian soldiers remained at the Taj Mahal on Sunday

Pakistan has expressed concern about rising tensions with India following allegations that gunmen who attacked Mumbai this week had Pakistani links.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari offered full co-operation with India and his government denied any involvement in the deadly attacks.

Wednesday's gun and bomb assault on India's commercial capital left at least 195 people dead and 295 injured.

Troops killed the last of the gunmen at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel on Saturday.

As few as 10 militants may have been involved in the assault which saw attacks in multiple locations including two hotels, a major railway station, a hospital and a Jewish centre.

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While the vast majority of victims were Indians, at least 22 foreigners are known to have died, including victims from Israel, Germany, Japan, Canada, Australia, Italy, Singapore, Thailand and France. One Briton, Andreas Liveras, was also killed.

Some of the gunmen came ashore by rubber dinghy on the night the killing began, others are reported to have been in the city for months gathering information on their targets.

The BBC's Chris Morris reports from the city that many people in Mumbai want their own government to look into the failure of intelligence which allowed the events of this traumatic week to unfold with such bloodshed.

'9/11 for India'

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said the strain in relations with India was serious but he hoped the crisis could be defused.

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Speaking after an emergency cabinet meeting in the capital Islamabad, he told reporters:

"Let us not fool ourselves, it is a serious situation when the people in India feel this is 9/11 for India.

"I think as a responsible elected government, we cannot be oblivious of the seriousness of the situation."

He pledged that intelligence officials would fully co-operate with the Indian investigation but added that the country's intelligence chief would not travel to India as earlier reported, something he called a "miscommunication".

A senior security official said Pakistan had now received preliminary evidence from India, the BBC's Barbara Plett reports from Islamabad.

But he warned that if India started to mobilise troops, Pakistan would respond in kind, even if that meant pulling soldiers away from fighting Islamist militants on the Afghan border.

He said the next 48 hours would be crucial in determining to what level tensions would escalate.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said earlier he believed that a group based outside India was behind the killings and senior Indian politicians have said the only surviving gunman to be captured is from Pakistan.

A claim of responsibility for this week's attacks was made by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen - a reference to a mainly Muslim region of India.

According to a statement leaked to Indian newspapers, the one alleged militant captured alive, named as Azam Amir Qasab, said the Mumbai militants had received training from an Islamist group once backed by Pakistani intelligence, Lashkar-e-Toiba.

Pakistan banned the group in 2002 at US insistence.

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