Pakistan-based group eyed after Mumbai

As Indian investigators sift through the wreckage of Tuesday's deadly railway blasts in Mumbai, which killed at least 200 and wounded 700, suspicions are beginning to point to Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, or the Army of the Righteous, a Pakistani-based militant outfit with a long history of terrorist attacks inside India.

It is too early to say whether the group was directly responsible for masterminding the violence. A Lashkar-e-Tayyaba spokesperson, Abdullah Ghaznavi, denied that the group was involved in the attack.

But the blasts help shine a spotlight on what some analysts here claim is the state's troubling ambivalence toward militant groups, letting them change names and operate at low levels for matters of political expediency.

Whether or not Lashkar-e-Tayyaba was directly involved, they add, the group has achieved a kind of inspirational leadership role, becoming an operational template for militant splinter groups in India in much the same way that Al Qaeda has on the global stage.

"This is a new dimension. In India you now have groups of Muslims who may be influenced by Lashkar-y-Tayyba, but which act independently," says Hasan Askari Rizvi, a defense analyst in Lahore. "Lashkar-e-Tayyaba has become a pejorative to cover all such groups."

Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, which first emerged in 1993, has demonstrated a sophisticated capacity to carry out brutal, large-scale attacks, some of them deep inside Indian territory. Indian authorities implicated them in the 2001 attack on Parliament, which left 14 people dead, and also blame them for killing more than 100 people within two days in Indian-held Kashmir in 2000.

The group, which the US State Department describes as having several thousand members, was used as a proxy by the Pakistani Army and intelligence agencies against Indian forces in Kashmir throughout the 1990s, analysts say, when tensions between the nuclear rivals ran especially high. Receiving patronage and support from the state, it was also allowed to collect funds and recruit members openly.

The State Department describes its aid stream as including donations from Pakistanis in the Persian Gulf and Britain, as well as donations from Islamic nongovernmental organizations and Pakistani business people.

These open-ended operations changed, on paper at least, following the Sept. 11 attacks and President Bush's crackdown on international terrorist groups. In October 2001, Washington designated Lashkar-e-Tayyaba as a terrorist affiliate. Under US pressure, President Pervez Musharraf banned the group in 2002.

But many analysts say that Lashkar-e-Tayyaba merely changed its name. Calling itself Jamat-ud-Dawa, it said it was a welfare and educational organization, spreading the teachings of Wahhabi Islam through a large network of schools, hospitals and madrassahs.

Its reemergence, analysts say, is typical of many purportedly banned militant organizations in Pakistan.

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