Hail of gunfire at hotel ends days of rampage

5 Americans among dead in India; An FBI team will investigate

Saurabh Das/Associated PressNational Security Guard commandos fired at suspected militants holed up at Nariman House, where a resident took cover, in Mumbai, India. Commandos killed the last two gunmen inside the luxury Oberoi hotel, where 24 bodies had been found. (Saurabh Das/Associated Press)

MUMBAI, India - Indian security forces killed the last remaining gunmen holed up at a luxury hotel this morning, the city's police chief said, ending a 60-hour rampage through India's financial capital by suspected Islamic militants that killed more than 195 people and rocked the nation.

Flames and smoke engulfed the landmark 400-room Taj Mahal hotel after dawn as Indian forces ended the final siege in a hail of gunfire. A few hours earlier, elite commandos had stormed a Jewish center and found six hostages dead.

"The Taj operation is over. The last two terrorists holed up there have been killed," Mumbai Police Chief Hasan Ghafoor told the Associated Press.

The rampage began Wednesday when gunmen attacked 10 sites across the city. At least 16 foreigners, including five Americans, were among the dead.

Indian officials said they now believe that at least 15 gunmen carried out the operation after reaching Mumbai by sea. By yesterday evening, at least nine gunmen had been killed and one arrested, said R. Patil, a top official in Maharashtra state.

Indian intelligence officials said they suspected that a Pakistani Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible, but they provided no details. An Indian intelligence document from 2006 obtained by the Washington Post said members of the group had been trained in maritime assault. The United States said it is sending an FBI team to help with the investigation.

Pakistani officials, responding to the charges by Indian leaders, said a senior intelligence officer would travel to India, in an apparent attempt to ease tensions between the two nuclear-armed states.

Authorities said more than 350 had been injured in attacks on the Taj Mahal and Oberoi luxury hotels, the Jewish center, and other sites in Mumbai.

Early today, police said they had defeated the gunmen at the Oberoi hotel and were rooting out remaining attackers at the Taj Mahal hotel, removing hundreds of people from both hotels. Explosions from fighting at the Taj could be heard outside the hotel this morning.

In the most dramatic of the counterstrikes yesterday morning, masked Indian commandos rappelled from a helicopter to the rooftop of the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish center as snipers laid down cover fire.

For nearly 12 hours, explosions and gunfire erupted from the five-story building as the commandos fought their way downward, while thousands of people gathered behind barricades in the streets to watch.

The assault blew huge holes in the center, and, at one point, Indian forces fired a rocket at the building. Soon after, commandos ran outside with their rifles raised over their heads in a sign of triumph. But inside the Chabad House was a horrific scene.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel told Israeli Channel 1 TV that the bodies of three women and three men were found at the center. Some of the victims had been bound, Barak said. Local media reports, quoting military officials, said two gunmen were found dead in the building.

Chabad-Lubavitch is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group that runs outreach centers in far-flung areas of the globe. The center in Mumbai served as a synagogue and cultural center for Israeli tourists and the small local Jewish community, the group said.

Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, a spokesman for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, said the dead Americans at the Jewish center were Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg; Bentzion Chroman, an Israeli and New Yorker with dual US citizenship; and Leibish Teitlebaum, an American from Brooklyn. Holtzberg's wife, Rivkah, was an Israeli citizen.

Two other US victims of the attack, from a Virginia community that promotes a form of meditation, were identified yesterday as Alan Scherr, 58, and his daughter, Naomi, 13, of Faber, Va. They were killed in a cafe Wednesday night at the Oberoi, said Bobbie Garvey, a spokeswoman for the Synchronicity Foundation.

The other dead were from Australia, France, Italy, Canada, Japan, Germany, Singapore, and a dual British-Cypriot citizen.

Mumbai Police Commissioner Hassan Ghafoor said police teams had found 41 of the dead inside the Oberoi by midnight yesterday, and that room-to-room searches were continuing.

Indian officials said that two captured gunmen were British citizens of Pakistani origin. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and other officials said they had not been informed that Britons had been arrested, but added that investigations were continuing.

Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, warned India not to "be jingoist" in making accusations about the attackers' origins, and said the two countries "are facing a common enemy, and we have to join hands to defeat this enemy."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke by phone yesterday with President-elect Barack Obama for the third time since the attacks began.

"These terrorists who targeted innocent civilians will not defeat India's great democracy, nor shake the will of a global coalition to defeat them," Obama said in a statement. "The United States must stand with India and all nations and people who are committed to destroying terrorist networks, and defeating their hate-filled ideology."

The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston denounced the attacks in a statement yesterday. "We are appalled by the absolute disregard for the value of human life displayed by these senseless acts of terrorism and we categorically condemn those responsible," said Nancy Kaufman, executive director of the council.

Indian intelligence officials said the gunmen who launched the coordinated attack appeared well trained and well prepared. The assailants seemed familiar with the layouts of the two hotels and the Jewish center, giving them a tactical advantage over the police and Indian Army troops sent in to dislodge them.

"This is a big-scale operation, but it is not beyond the capability of Lashkar-e-Taiba," said the intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work. "The person we have caught is a foot soldier; he is from Pakistan's Punjab," the officer said, referring to a region divided by the India-Pakistan border.

"He has clearly said he is with Lashkar, and that he was trained," the officer said. "They came via a ship. They hijacked a boat called Kuber, shot the man in charge on the boat. They were carrying a CD with the photographs of all the targets of the site, details."

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.