Police arrested four Indian Muslims for alleged involvement in a planned attack on Mumbai as early as February, a senior police officer who handled the case told The Times yesterday.

One of them, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, was carrying a fake Pakistani passport and a list and maps of nine targets in southern Mumbai, including the Taj Mahal hotel and other sites attacked last week, the officer said.

The revelation appears to undermine India’s assertion that the attack on Mumbai last week, in which 171 people were killed, was planned and executed only by Pakistani members of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which has links to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Security officials and experts have told the Indian Government that it faces a growing threat from home-grown Islamic militants recruited from the country’s 150 million-strong Muslim population. The officer’s claim also raises questions about Indian authorities’ failure to respond to warnings of an attack on Mumbai.

Ansari and his alleged accomplices were arrested on February 10 in the cities of Rampur and Lucknow in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, according to Amitabh Yash, director of the Special Task Force of the state police. They were charged with involvement in a gun and grenade attack on a Central Reserve Police Force camp in Rampur that killed at least seven officers and one civilian in the early hours of December 31.

Also arrested were three Indian Muslims and two Pakistani nationals – all of them members of LeT – as they attempted to transfer weapons used in the Rampur attack by train to Mumbai, he said. “We can’t be sure of their intentions, but all of them were moving to Mumbai with weapons when they were captured,” Mr Yash said. “It clearly reveals the mindset of Lashkar-e-Taiba.”

The weapons they were carrying included two AK47s, a Chinese pistol and five grenades, he added.

Ansari was found with a list, maps and even sketches of nine Mumbai sites, including the Taj and Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s main railway station, which was also attacked last week, Mr Yash said. Ansari told police interrogators that he had come to collect the weapons from Uttar Pradesh having carried out a recce of potential targets in Mumbai.

Ansari was born in a slum in Mumbai and was recruited by LeT when he took a job as a mechanic at a printing press in Dubai in December 2005, Mr Yash said. He was taken by boat to the Pakistani port of Karachi a year later and then on to an LeT training camp in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

There he met Yusuf Muzammil, an LeT operative named by Indian officials as one of those who master-minded the Mumbai attacks, Mr Yash said. Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the only gunman to be captured alive, has said that he was trained in the same camp, according to police interrogators.

Ansari was given a fake Pakistani passport and used it to go first to Nepal, and then to India, where he resumed his Indian identity and travelled to Mumbai, Mr Yash said.

He rented an apartment, did a computer course and qualified for a driver’s licence, all the time checking out potential targets, before travelling to Uttar Pradesh in February. “His instructions were to find a safe house, get weapons and carry out a recce,” he said. “He had done that recce and come to collect the weapons from Uttar Pradesh.” Ansari was first interrogated in Uttar Pradesh and then handed to Mumbai police in February, while the other five remained in custody there.

Mumbai police also questioned Ansari before placing him in judicial custody, where he remains, Mr Yash said, adding that he had passed all the information his team gleaned to the Intelligence Bureau, which handles India’s domestic security.

Indian investigators are now understood to be questioning Ansari again to cross reference his testimony with that of Kasab.

Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s new Home Minister, admitted yesterday that the Mumbai attacks had revealed serious shortfalls in India’s security apparatus.

“I would be less than truthful if I said there were no lapses,” he said. “These are being looked into. We will address the causes that led to the lapses.” However, Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, repeated his assertion that the attacks originated from the soil of a neighbour – a clear reference to Pakistan.

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