Pakistan makes arrest in Mumbai attacks

NY Times:

Pakistan acknowledged for the first time in public on Thursday that parts of the murderous Mumbai terror attacks were planned on its soil and said six new suspects were being held, including “the main operator.”

Rehman Malik, the senior security official in the Interior Ministry, said the attackers had set sail from southern Pakistan to Mumbai, where they used inflatable boats whose engines had been purchased in the southern Pakistani port of Karachi.

“Part of the conspiracy was done in Pakistan,” Mr. Malik said in a televised news briefing Thursday. He said a formal police inquiry had been launched “and I want to assure our nation, I want to assure the international community, that we mean business.”

His remarks offered the fullest public accounting so far of Pakistan’s investigation into the Mumbai attacks last November, when 10 attackers went on a murderous spree through luxury hotels, a Jewish center and other targets, leaving 163 people dead.

Only one of the attackers, Ajmal Kasab, survived and Pakistan has already acknowledged he was of Pakistani origin. But the disclosures on Thursday seemed, initially at least, to vindicate some of India’s earlier claims of greater Pakistani involvement, although they were not confirmation of India’s claims that elements of the Pakistani security services agencies may have been involved.

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Mr. Malik said investigators had identified three boats used in the attack. “The boats that were used by the terrorists to reach Mumbai are under our possession,” he said. “We have also identified the crew,” he said. “We have located the hide-outs.”

He identified by name some of those arrested as a result of the inquiry and said one of them had been lured back to Pakistan from Spain.

“Muhammad Ishfaq is under our custody,” Mr. Malik said, referring to one of the detained suspects. “Javed Iqbal, located in Spain — he is under our custody,” he said, without elaborating on their roles.

Sketching the international profile of the attackers’ communications, he said cellphone SIM cards were bought in Austria while voice calls over the Internet, using a server in Houston, Texas, were paid for in Barcelona, Spain.

“One person named Javed Iqbal was living in Barcelona,” he said. “Don’t ask how I brought him to Pakistan. He was lured to come here.”

Mr. Malik identified another of the conspirators held in Pakistan as Hamman Amin Sadiq, who, he said, had been traced through telephone records and bank transfers.

“He was basically the main operator,” Mr. Malik said.

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I blame the Democrats for the use of the Houston server, so that the NSA would have to jump through hoops before intercepting the communications. It demonstrates how terrorist are using the logic of the Democrat terrorist rights advocates to make it more difficult to stop terror attacks.

These terrorist rights advocates have put the world on the strategic defensive where we can only come in after the mass murders and put the CIS teams on the case to try to catch the rest of the perps.

It is interesting that Pakistan has developed so much evidence when just days ago it was asking for more evidence from India. The purchase of the outboard motors for the boats seems like pretty significant evidence to me.