BOMBAY, India - India demanded Monday that Pakistan take "strong action" against those behind the deadly Bombay attacks, and Washington pressured Islamabad to cooperate with the investigation.
The only known surviving attacker told police that his group trained for months in camps operated by a banned Pakistani militant group, learning close-combat techniques, explosives training and other tactics for their three-day siege.
Teams from the FBI and Britain's Scotland Yard met with top Indian police as they prepared to help collect evidence, a police official said.
Soldiers removed the remaining bodies from the shat-tered Taj Mahal hotel, where the standoff finally ended Saturday morning, with at least 172 people dead and 239 wounded. The army had already cleared other siege sites, including the five-star Oberoi hotel and the Bombay headquarters of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group.
India's financial hub returned to normal Monday to some degree, with parents dropping their children off at school and shopkeepers opening for the first time since the attacks, which Indian authorities blamed on the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkare-Taiba.
"I think this is the first Monday I am glad to be coming to work," said Donica Trivedi, 23, an employee of a public-relations agency.
Jewelry stores, clothing shops and food kiosks in a winding side street near the Jewish center were back in business. But the normally bustling street was half-empty, and business owners said customers were slow in returning to an area so close to the violence.
In the past two days, the country's top law enforcement official has resigned and two top state officials have offered to quit amid growing criticism that the 10 gunmen who carried out the 60-hour attack appeared better trained, better coordinated and better armed than India's security forces and police.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has promised to strengthen maritime and air security and look into creating a new federal investigative agency, was expected to meet today with top security aides as the government faces widespread accusations of security and intelligence failures.
An official said Indian intelligence had picked up information as recently as September that Pakistan-based terrorists were plotting attacks against Bombay targets.
The official said India's foreign intelligence agency then relayed the information to domestic security officials.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly about the details.
Pakistan's high commissioner to India met with Foreign Ministry officials and was told that "elements from Pakistan" had carried out the attacks, said ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash. His phrasing, though, carefully avoided blaming the Pakistani government.
The commissioner was told that India "expects that strong action would be taken against those elements," Prakash said.
India's demands were reinforced by the United States as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who will visit India later this week, said the perpetrators of the attacks "must be brought to justice."
Pakistan must "follow the evidence wherever it leads," she said during a visit in London. "This is a time for complete, absolute, total transparency and cooperation, and that's what we expect."
Opening the books on any possible Pakistani involvement is in the best interests of the young,U.S.-backed civilian government there, Bush administration officials said. Terrorists threaten Pakistan as well as India and the West, Rice said.
"You can't have different colors of extremism. Extremism is extremism," she said.
Rice said she will not "jump to conclusions."
Pakistan has repeatedly insisted it was not behind the attacks. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said Monday that thegunmen were "nonstate actors" and warned against letting their actions lead to greater regional enmity.
"Such a tragic incident must bring opportunity rather than the defeat of a nation," Zardari told Arj television. "We don't think the world's great nations and countries can be held hostage by nonstate actors."
At the White House, press secretary Dana Perino said she had "heard nothing that says the Pakistani government was involved."
Later, Perino added the White House has "no reason" not to trust the Pakistanis.
A previously unknown Muslim group called Deccan Mujahideen - a name suggesting origins inside India - has claimed responsibility for the attacks. But the sole surviving attacker, Ajmal Qasab, told police that his group trained over about six months in camps operated by Lashkar in Pakistan, learning close-combat techniques, hostage taking, handling of explosives, satellite navigationand high-seas survival skills, according to two Indian security officials familiar with the investigation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the details.
Lashkar was banned in Pakistan under pressure from the U.S. in 2002, a year after Washington and Britain listed it a terrorist group. It is since believed to have emerged under another name, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, althoughthat group has denied links to the Bombay attack.
Qasab told investigators the militants hijacked an Indian vessel and killed three crew members, keeping the captain alive long enough to guide them into Bombay, the two security officials said.
The men, ages 18-28, then came ashore in a dinghy at two different Bombay areas before slipping into the city in two teams, officials said. The gunmen struck at several sites, including a train station, where they mowed down police and passers-by; the Jewish center; and the two luxury hotels, representing the city's wealth and tourism, reportedly seeking out Westerners.
Some new details emerged Monday about the difficulties faced by the Indian police commandos who responded to the killings last week. The attackers used grenades to booby-trap some of the dead bodies in the two hotels where they struck, the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, Inspector Rakesh Maria said.
That tactic made fighting the attackers more difficult and significantly delayed the cleanup after the violence ended, Maria said.
But those details seemed unlikely to blunt the rising public anger at the government's handling of the attacks, which have been widely described as India's version of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.
On Monday, rising public outcry pushed the chief minister of Maharashtra state, Vilasrao Deshmukh, a member of the governing Congress Party, to offer his resignation. Party leaders were still considering his offer Monday night.
"I accept moral responsibility for the terror attacks," he said at a news conference.
Earlier in the day, his deputy, R.R. Patil, officially stepped down. The two gestures came a day after India's highest-ranking domestic security official, Home Minister Shivraj Patil, resigned, saying he took responsibility for the failure to forestall or quickly contain thethree-day killing rampage.
Among the 19 foreigners killed were six Americans.
The dead also included Germans, Canadians, Israelis and nationals from Britain, Italy, Mexico, Japan, China, Thailand, Australia, Singapore and Mexico.
Today a bomb blast on a train killed at least two people and wounded 30 in India's insurgency-hit northeast, an Indian official said.
District Magistrate M.C. Sahu says the blast occurred this morning in one of the coaches just after the train arrived at Diphu railroad station, about 200 miles south of Gauhati, the capital of Assam state.
Information for this article was contributed by Ramola Talwar Badam, Ashok Sharma, Ravi Nessman, Asif Shahzad, Anne Gearan and Liz Sidoti of The Associated Press and by Somini Sengupta, Robert F. Worth, Keith Bradsher, Jeremy Kahn, Ruth Fremson, Heather Timmons, Hari Kumar, Isabel Kershner, Mark McDonald and Graham Bowley of The New York Times.
