Captured LeT commander confesses involvement in Mumbai attacks

NEW YORK: Top Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Zarar Shah captured in the crackdown on militants earlier this month in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, has confessed the group's involvement in terror attacks in Mumbai, a media report said on Wednesday.

Shah has also implicated other LeT members, and had broadly confirmed the confession made by the sole captured militant Ajmal Kasab to Indian investigators that the 10 assailants trained in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and then went by boat from Karachi to Mumbai, the Wall Street Journal reported quoting a senior Pakistani security official.

The paper said Pakistan's own investigation of terror attacks in Mumbai have begun to show substantive links between the LeT and 10 gunmen who tookpart in the Mumbai mission.

Pakistani security officials were quoted as saying that a top Lashkar commander, Zarar Shah, has admitted a role in the Mumbai attack during interrogation.

The paper quoted a person familiar with investigation as saying that Shah also admitted that the attackers spent at least a few weeks in Karachi, training in urban combat to hone skills they would use in their assault.

The disclosure, it said, could add new international pressure on Pakistan to accept that the attacks, which left 183 dead in India, originated within its borders and to prosecute or extradite the suspects.

That raises difficult and potentially destabilising issues for the country's new civilian government, its military and the spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) -- which is conducting interrogations of militants it once cultivated as partners, the Journal said.