The tactics employed by the gunmen who attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore today were quickly likened to those used in the terrorist assault on Mumbai in November last year.

Both incidents involved commando-style groups of heavily armed, highly trained gunmen – 10 in Mumbai, 12 or 14 in Lahore – who appear to have operated in pairs, Pakistani officials and security experts said. The attacks struck at high-profile targets and succeeded in garnering headlines across the world.

In both Mumbai and Lahore the terrorists were armed with AK47 rifles and grenades, carried backpacks and were dressed in casual Western-style clothes. Both attacks bore the hallmarks of “fidayeen” operations – they were almost suicidal, but did not involve the attackers taking their own lives.

They appear to have been well planned. The Mumbai gunmen are thought to have been given reconnaissance information by two Indian collaborators who surveyed the attack sites months before the attack.

In Lahore, the terrorists knew the details of the route to be taken by the Sri Lankan cricketers to the Gadaffi stadium and converged on the spot from several directions at once. If a rocket-propelled grenade had not failed to explode properly, the death toll in Lahore would surely have been much higher.

The similarities will raise questions as to whether the same organisation is behind both atrocities. The Mumbai attacks are widely believed to have been the work of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist faction, which was groomed during the 1990s by Pakistan's intelligence agency to fight in Indian-controlled Kashmir and which experts believe now has links with al-Qaeda.

Security experts said that the involvement of the Tamil Tigers, the separatist rebel group that is fighting the Sri Lankan Government, could not be ruled out – but that the Lahore attack seemed to match the LeT’s favoured method of operation.

For years the LeT, which was recently labelled by Michael Hayden, the outgoing director of the CIA, as one of the ten most dangerous challenges faced by Western security forces, has been cultivating fidayeen squads of young gunmen.

LeT's vast headquarters is found just outside of outside Lahore, in Muridke. It is thought to have been behind the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament building in Delhi – another assault carried out by a commando-style squad brandishing AK-47s and grenades – that led to India mobilising 700,000 troops along its border. It was banned in Pakistan in 2002, but has continued to operate with near impunity, Indian officials allege.

Evidence collected by the Mumbai police, who have named 35 suspected LeT operatives wanted for the attacks on the city, suggests that it has the manpower to carry out a Lahore-type operation. The sole Mumbai gunmen to be taken alive has told interrogators that he was one of at least 30 young men being trained at camps in Pakistan.

In a 2005 Husain Haqqani, now Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, said that the LeT represented “the most significant jihadi group of Wahhabi [an ultra-strict form of Islam] persuasion” and that it was backed by cash from Saudi Arabia and protected by the ISI, Pakistan's powerful spy agency.

The LeT is also thought to have raised money from the Pakistani community in the UK. It is led by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, a former professor of Islamic studies who India demanded Pakistan hand over in December for his alleged role in the Mumbai attacks.

For its part the LeT has made clear that its agenda goes much further than Kashmir. In a manifesto titled “Why are we waging jihad?” it said that it was battling for Muslim rule over all of India and declared the United States and Israel enemies.

However, the LeT is far from being the only group to have recently launched military style assaults in the region.

According to the longwarjournal.org website, a host of organisations – including the Taleban, al-Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami – have engaged in similar attacks. The most recent example was when the Justice and Education ministries and the Prisons Directorate headquarters were targeted in Kabul.

The website also identifies the current trend for these groups to join forces to fight Pakistan government forces in Pakistan and Nato and Afghan troops in Afghanistan. In particular, it suggests that al-Qaeda has revived its paramilitary army, the Lashkar al-Zil, or Shadow Army, a body that brings together fighters from all these disparate factions.

Meanwhile, among some Pakistan officials, another explanation was being promoted: that the attacks in Lahore had been sponsored by its historical arch enemy India.

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