Police: Gunmen came by boat from Pakistan

The U.S. warned India that militants were planning an assault, a U.S. official said.

MUMBAI, India (AP) — The gunmen who attacked Mumbai set out by boat from the Pakistani port of Karachi, then later hijacked an Indian fishing trawler that carried them toward this financial capital on their suicide mission, a top police official said Tuesday.

As evidence of the militants’ links to Pakistan mounted, Mumbai police commissioner Hasan Ghafoor said ex-Pakistani army officers trained the group — some for up to 18 months — and denied reports the men had been planning to escape the city.

“It appears that it was a suicide attack,” Ghafoor said, providing no other details about when the gunmen left Karachi, or when they hijacked the trawler.

The revelations came as a senior U.S. official said India received a warning from the United States that militants were plotting a waterborne assault on Mumbai. The Bush administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of intelligence information, would not elaborate on the timing or details of the U.S. warning.

The Indian government is already facing intense public accusations of security and intelligence failures after suspected Muslim militants carried out the three-day attack across Mumbai last week, killing at least 172 people and wounding 239.

Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee also said his country gave a list of about 20 people — including India’s most-wanted man — to Pakistan’s high commissioner to New Delhi on Monday.

India stepped up the pressure on its neighbor after interrogating the only surviving attacker, who told police that he and the other nine gunmen had trained for months in camps in Pakistan operated by the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. On Tuesday, U.S. officials also pointed the finger at Pakistani-based groups, although they did not specifically mention Lashkar.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to arrive today, and the U.S. is pressuring Islamabad to cooperate in the investigation of the siege that paralyzed Mumbai and left six Americans dead.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said extremists were “apparently targeting Americans and Britons, but the truth is that most of those who were attacked were Indians.”

Gates also told a Pentagon news conference that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, was headed to the region.

Of greater concern for India was the apparent failure to act on multiple warnings ahead of the Mumbai attacks, which Indian navy chief Sureesh Mehta called “a systemic failure.”

India’s foreign intelligence agency also had warnings as recently as September that Pakistan-based terrorists were plotting attacks on Mumbai, according to a government intelligence official familiar with the matter.

The information, intercepted from telephone conversations apparently coming out of Pakistan, indicated that hotels might be targeted but did not specify which ones, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the details.

The information was relayed to domestic security authorities, but it was unclear whether the government acted on the intelligence.

The Taj Mahal hotel, scene of much of the bloodshed, had tightened security with metal detectors and other measures in the weeks before the attacks, after being warned of a possible threat.