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Pakistan Arrests MumbaiSuspect

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The Associated Press

Published: December 9, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - 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 Pakistan's first known response to U.S. and Indian demands for the arrest of the 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 Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistani Kashmir, the officials said. There was a brief clash 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.
Indian officials say the sole Mumbai attacker captured has told them that Lakhvi recruited him for the mission and that Lakhvi and another militant, Yusuf Muzammil, designed the attack. The three- day siege of India's financial capital left 174 people dead.

Analysts say Lashkar-e-Taiba was created with the help of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in the 1980s as proxy fighters in Indian Kashmir.

The United States says the group has links to al-Qaida. In May, the U.S. Treasury Department alleged that Lakhvi directed Lashkar-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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