Security forces overran a militant camp on the outskirts of Pakistani Kashmir’s main city and seized an alleged mastermind of the attacks that shook India’s financial capital last month, two officials said Monday.
The raid was the first known response to demands by India and the United States that Pakistan targets the alleged perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks, which have sharply raised tensions between South Asia’s two nuclear-armed powers.
Backed by a helicopter, the troops grabbed Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi among at least 12 people taken Sunday in the raid on the riverbank camp run by the banned group Laskhar-e-Taiba in Pakistani Kashmir, the officials said. There was a brief gunfight in the camp near Muzaffarabad before the militants were subdued, the officials said.
The officials – one from the intelligence agencies and one from a government agency – spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Indian officials say the sole Mumbai attacker captured alive has told them that Lakhvi recruited him for the mission and that Lakhvi and another militant, Yusuf Muzammil, planned the operation. The three-day seige of India’s commercial capital left 171 people dead.
Analysts say Lashkar-e-Taiba was created with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in the 1980s to act as a proxy fighting force in Indian Kashmir.
The United States says the group has links to al-Qaida. In May, U.S. Department of the Treasury alleged that Lakhvi directed Laskhar-e-Taiba operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and Southeast Asia, In 2004, he allegedly sent operatives and funds to attack U.S. forces in Iraq, it said.
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