Indian minister resigns over Mumbai attacks

Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil addresses the media after a cabinet meeting with PM Manmohan Singh.

MUMBAI, India — India’s Home Minister Shivraj Patil submitted his resignation Sunday as the country investigated alleged Pakistani ties to the terrorist attacks that killed 183 people in Mumbai. The fallout from the attacks is damaging the tenuous relationship between India and Pakistan, said CNN’s sister station in India.

The Indian government is considering suspending the five-year-old cease-fire with Pakistan and perhaps even ending the dialogue process with the country, sources told.

Pakistani security officials told CNN that if tensions with India escalate, Pakistan may shift its military forces from the Afghan border east to prepare for any conflict.

The 60-hour wave of violence began Wednesday night as gunmen surged into at least nine locations in Mumbai, killing at least 183 people and wounding about 300.

The official death toll does not include at least 11 gunmen killed in battles with security forces.

Authorities have said that some of the attackers, who arrived in Mumbai by boat, were from Pakistan.

“Yes, the captured terrorist was Pakistani, as the home minister and others have said. As far as the others, the accomplices, the investigation, the interrogation is under way and the details will become public very soon,” said Vilasrao Deshmukh, chief minister of Maharashtra.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, vowed Saturday to take action against any group within its borders if it is found to be involved with the attacks.

Interpol had said it would send a delegation to India to aid in the investigation. But on Sunday, the international law enforcement agency was still waiting for official permission into the country, a spokesman said.

“We believe that time is of the essence in Interpol’s getting to India in order to explore any potential international links with regard to the seized evidence as well as the fingerprints and DNA of the suspected terrorists,” a statement said.

The resignation of India’s home minister could also slow down the agency’s being allowed into India, the statement said.

Officials say they found telephones and a global navigational device on an abandoned boat floating off the coast of Mumbai that was used by the terrorists, CNN-IBN reported. The television network showed photographs of a phone’s call log that revealed calls had been placed to Pakistan.

The boat had been hijacked, intelligence officials told CNN-IBN. Four crew members who had been on board were missing. The captain was found dead, face down with his hands bound behind his back.

The targets of the attacks included luxury hotels packed with foreign tourists. The 105-year-old Taj Mahal hotel was the site of the attackers’ final stand, as gunmen held hostages and refused to leave the facility.

The chairman of the company that owns the hotel told CNN that the company had been warned about the possibility of a terrorist attack before the massacre.

The hotel heightened security as a result, the chairman of the Tata Group and Taj Hotels, Ratan Tata, said in a taped interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN’s “GPS.”

There were indications, though, that the hotel had relaxed security before the attack.

“It’s ironic that we did have such a warning and we did have some measures,” Tata said. “People couldn’t park their cars in the portico where you had to go through a metal detector.”

“But if I look at what we had — which all of us complained about — it could not have stopped what took place. They didn’t come through that entrance,” he said.

“They came from somewhere in the back. They planned everything,” he said of the attackers. “I believe the first thing they did, they shot a sniffer dog and his handler. They went through the kitchen, they knew what they were doing.” Watch the destruction left at the hotel »

The security response to the attacks has brought criticism and led to the resignation of Patil, the home minister.

Patil, who had been widely criticized even before terrorists struck, submitted his resignation to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Home Ministry spokesman said.

Singh accepted the resignation and immediately named Finance Minister P. Chidambaram to take over the Home Ministry post, according to a source in the prime minister’s office.

N. Ram, editor-in-chief of The Hindu — a major Indian newspaper — said Patil’s departure was overdue.

“This man has been widely criticized for not being up to it and it was simply impossible that he could stay on after this,” Ram said.

The criticism of Patil was “that he has been very slow, that they haven’t delivered in the promise to improve intelligence.” iReport.com: Share tributes to those lost

The toll from the attacks is expected to rise as authorities count the casualties inside the Taj Mahal hotel, whose burned-out lobby was littered with shards of glass.

At least 18 foreigners were among the victims, including five Americans and eight Israelis.

Indian authorities found five bodies Friday of hostages at the Chabad House, a Jewish community center.

The carnage could have been worse, investigators said.

“We found bullets with them, hand grenades, bombs,” said R. R. Patil, deputy chief minister of Maharashtra state, where Mumbai is located. “Based on our investigation, we believe they had planned to kill 5,000 people.”

President Bush spoke Sunday to Singh, the National Security Council said. Noting that U.S. citizens were among those killed, the president “said that we would all be working together, with the international community, to go after these extremists,” according to a statement from National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

India’s major political parties Sunday held a five-hour meeting in which all involved pledged to find ways to strengthen security in the country and discussed a proposal to set up a federal investigation agency to look into the attacks, said External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

>>>Cnn

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