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Updated at 12.32 GMT (18.02 Bombay)

Indian commandos stormed a Jewish centre in a Bombay apartment block today and traded gunfire with militants still holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel after releasing dozens of trapped foreigners.

The Times saw an Indian air force helicopter dropping 17 commandos onto the roof of Nariman House, a six-storey building where militants are holding up to a dozen Israeli cititzens hostage.

Snipers in buildings across the road peppered the building with bullets as the commandos were lowered, shortly after dawn. Earlier, at least six trucks of soldiers were brought in to surround the building, which houses the local headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Jewish group Chabad Lubavitch.

Throughout the morning, heavy gunfire punctuated by explosions rocked the building as commandos attempted to take it floor by floor. A senior police officer at the scene said: "It's the final clean-up, we hope."

Indian special forces, meanwhile, gave their first account of the mission to liberate the Taj Mahal. They described a sequence of running battles with gunmen in corridors and rooms strewn with dead bodies and seriously injured guests - battles which appeared to be intensifying this afternoon.

But officials claimed success in ending a siege of the luxury Oberoi hotel, where as many as 30 people had been held hostage. Commandos killed two gunmen as they seized control of the tower today.

“The hotel is under our control,” J.K. Dutt, director general of India’s elite National Security Guard commando unit, told reporters. He said that 24 bodies had been recovered from the hotel, pushing the confirmed death toll from the coordinated attacks up to 143.

Among the dead are seven foreigners, including one Briton - the yachting entrepreneur Andreas Liveras. Gordon Brown said today that he did not believe any further Britons were still being held hostage in either hotel.

In New Delhi, a Government minister explicitly pointed the finger at Pakistan for the first time. “Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved,” Pranab Mukherjee, the Foreign Minister, told a press conference. In Bombay, officials said that one of the militants arrested was a Pakistani national.

The Pakistani Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, responded with a call to India not to play politics with the Bombay attacks. “Do not bring politics into this issue. This is a collective issue. We are facing a common enemy and we should join hands to defeat the enemy,” he said during a visit to the Indian town of Ajmer, which hosts an important Islamic shrine.

Nevertheless, Islamabad agreed to an Indian request to send the head of its military intelligence service, the ISI, to India to share information on the attacks.

The investigation into the al-Qaeda-style terror attacks is focusing on a fishing vessel that was found off the city's coast with a dead body aboard. It is thought that the vessel was used by the terrorists before they climbed aboard a smaller boat to land at Colaba, the tourist area in southern Bombay where the gunmen's targets are clustered.

The nationality of the dead man found on the boat is unknown, but one theory being pushed by many inside India's intelligence apparatus is that the boat's origin was Karachi, in Pakistan

The gunmen were well trained and well prepared, apparently scouting targets ahead of time and carrying large bags of almonds and dried fruit to keep up their energy.

“It’s obvious they were trained somewhere ... Not everyone can handle the AK series of weapons or throw grenades like that,” a senior office of India’s Marine Commando unit told reporters, his face wrapped in a black mask to protect his identity, told reporters today.

"These terrorists were very well informed regarding the layout of the hotel. In no time they vanished and were gone elsewhere. The kept moving around the hotel," the officer said.

Bags belonging to the terrorists contained hundreds of rounds of ammunition and grenades were recovered. A Mauritian national Id card, apparently that of one of the gunmen, was also found, together with seven credit cards and more than US$1,000 in cash.

The officer said that the Taj had been filled with terrified civilians, making it very difficult for the commandos to fire on the gunmen. “To try and avoid civilian casualties we had to be so much more careful,” he said. "Bodies were strewn all over the place, and there was blood everywhere.”

The commando added: "They were the kind of people with no remorse - anybody and whomsoever came in front of them they fired."

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