Shocking as Wednesday night’s attacks on Bombay may have been, they were not unprecedented in their audacity or tactics and may have been masterminded by a familiar enemy.

A terrorist group with training camps in Pakistan and strong ties with al-Qaeda as well as a history of mounting attacks in India yesterday became the chief suspect behind the atrocities.

Intelligence and security officials were cautious about making early conclusions but admitted that the scale of the attacks and the planning pointed to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terrorist group with a long record of violent extremism and previous connections to the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

If LeT carried out the attacks, it would be the first time the terror group has singled out Westerners. This, according to counter-terrorist experts, makes it even more likely that al-Qaeda was pulling the strings.

In December 2001, 12 people were killed when Islamic militants, armed with guns and grenades, attacked the Indian Parliament building in Delhi. The death toll may have been smaller, but the symbolic impact was almost as great, since it was not only an embarrassing security breach but also a blow to the heart of India’s democracy. LeT was responsible.

The group’s spokesman denied involvement in the Bombay attacks. The only claim of responsibility so far is from the Deccan Mujahidin, a previously unheard-of group. Some experts believe that it could be an offshoot of the Indian Mujahidin, which has claimed responsibility for a series of multiple bomb attacks this year. However, the complexity of the Bombay attack suggests that the perpetrators were trained by a military group or established Islamist organisation.

“Given the scale and sophistication, it appears to have been carried out by some group based in Pakistan,” said Kanchan Lakshman, of the South Asia Terrorism Portal. “A lot of preliminary evidence points to Lashkar-e-Taiba. This marks a superior level of warfare. This is direct combat and they are well trained and motivated.”

LeT, which is based at Muridke, near Lahore in Pakistan, has networks throughout India and its leadership has close links with core al-Qaeda figures living in Pakistan.

The attack was unusual in that it relied not on suicide bombers but on heavily armed “fedayin”, or suicide attackers, who typically take hostages and shoot it out with their opponents before sacrificing themselves.

That, according to experts, is a trademark of both LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammed – the other, smaller, group also blamed for the 2001 Indian parliament attack. Peter Bergen, a terrorist expert at Harvard University, said: “You know when you go in that you are going to die. In that sense, it is a suicidal, not a suicide, attack.” Both groups made their names fighting Indian rule in the disputed region of Kashmir and were linked in the past to the Pakistani ISI.

One of the Bombay attackers telephoned an Indian television channel yesterday to complain that the Indian Army was killing Muslims in Kashmir. He spoke Urdu in what sounded like a Kashmiri accent. But the attackers chose British, US and Israeli nationals when taking hostages, suggesting that they share al-Qaeda’s beliefs, said Mr Bergen, who interviewed Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997 for CNN.

Some analysts suggest that Pakistani militant groups have forged closer ties with al-Qaeda because of the continuing fighting with Pakistan’s Army in the northern tribal areas. They note that LeT has recently emphasised the idea of waging jihad against India, rather than just liberating Kashmir. It has also shared training camps in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda, and LeT fighters were among the dead in US missile strikes on al-Qaeda training camps in Khost, Afghanistan, in 1998.

Since it was banned by Pervez Musharraf, when President of Pakistan, in 2002, LeT has rarely claimed responsibility for any attack, fearing that this would bring further pressure on the Pakistani authorities to crack down on it. In several fedayin-style attacks attributed to the group, militants have left pamphlets or phoned the media using previously unheard-of names.

Mr Bergen said that while planning for Wednesday’s attack probably took place in Pakistan, the plotters probably used a local group in Bombay to execute it. Suspicion has fallen on the Indian Mujahidin as that partner.

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