Indian security chief resigns

Picture emerges of poorly equipped police and of commandos who took almost 10 hours to arrive

NEW DELHI, INDIA -- India on Sunday began grappling with the political and diplomatic fallout from one of its deadliest terror attacks in years. The nation's top domestic security official resigned under pressure and the government struggled to fashion a response amid mounting evidence that the attackers who killed at least 174 people in Mumbai last week had ties to an outlawed group in Pakistan.

The resignation of Home Minister Shivraj Patil came amid a growing chorus of public criticism over intelligence failures in the lead-up to the attack and delays in the security response after it began. Public anger toward the government spilled onto the streets as protesters held up signs in front of the burned-out Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel that read: "India has woken up. When will the politicians?"

The public discontent is casting a shadow over India's fragile relations with its neighbor Pakistan. Preliminary Indian investigations have revealed that the gunmen were trained there and came to Mumbai on boats via the Arabian Sea. Indian security officials said Sunday that the only survivor among the 10 attackers was a member of the Kashmiri guerrilla group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which remains active in Pakistan despite having been banned nearly seven years ago.

Pakistani officials have steadfastly denied culpability.

Advance warning?

As India weighs the political and diplomatic consequences of the assault on Mumbai, officials and political observers say Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faces constraints in selecting India's response. Nearing the end of his five-year term, Singh has little time to shake off the prevailing perception that his government has failed to tackle the threat of terrorism. A wave of bomb blasts has ripped through several Indian cities since May, killing about 260 people and injuring hundreds more.

"The government is on trial like never before," said Mahesh Rangarajan, an independent political analyst and columnist. "There is a feeling among the middle class that our politicians have failed us miserably. They want a leadership that will respond to a brick with a rock."

Singh promised to strengthen maritime and air security and look into creating a new federal investigative agency -- even as some analysts doubted fundamental change was possible.

"These guys could do it next week again in Mumbai, and our responses would be exactly the same," said Ajai Sahni, head of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.

Reports from New Delhi and Mumbai in recent days have indicated that the government had information about the likelihood of an attack from the sea and that there had been directives to boost coastal security.

In Washington, U.S. officials would not directly address a report that American intelligence may have passed along warnings about an impending attack.

As more details of the response to the attack emerged, a picture formed of woefully unprepared security forces.

Bapu Thombre, assistant commissioner with the Mumbai railway police, said the more than 60 police officers patrolling the city's main train station that was the site of the first attack were armed mainly with batons or World War I-era rifles.

"They are not trained to respond to major attacks," he said.

The gunmen continued their rampage outside the station. They eventually ambushed a police van, killed five officers inside -- including the city's counterterrorism chief -- and hijacked the vehicle as two wounded officers lay bleeding in the back seat.

With no SWAT team in this city of 18 million, authorities called in the only unit in the country trained to deal with such crises. But the National Security Guards, which largely devotes its resources to protecting top officials, is based outside of New Delhi and it took the commandos nearly 10 hours to reach the scene.

That gave the gunmen time to consolidate control over two luxury hotels and a Jewish center, said Sahni.

The commandos lacked proper equipment, including night vision goggles and thermal sensors that would have allowed them to find the hostages and gunmen inside the buildings, Sahni said.

J.K. Dutt, director-general of the commando unit, defended their tactics.

"We have conducted the operation in the way we are trained and in the way we like to do it," he said.

(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)