The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) revealed that senior Lashkar commander and the outfit’s communications chief Zarar Shah has told his Pakistani interrogators that he had been one of the key planners of the attacks, and had been in touch with the terrorists by phone as the 60-hour gun-battle raged.

And the Karachi-based Dawn reported from Washington that the US had given a tape to Pakistan containing conversations between Lashkar’s operations chief Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi and the terrorists. Pakistan is now under “tremendous pressure from the United States to extradite to Lakhvi to India,” the Dawn report said.

“Diplomatic sources in Washington said that American audio experts had checked the tape and concluded that it was genuine and that the speaker was Lakhvi,” Dawn said, adding it was, however, “not yet clear if the Americans recorded the conversation using their own surveillance methods or received the tape from the Indians”.

Dawn also revealed that there “appears to be a serious difference of opinion between Islamabad and the Pakistan Embassy in Washington” over how to react to the tape. “While Islamabad was reluctant to accept the evidence as authentic, the embassy insisted that it's authentic and that the Pakistani authorities now needed to take steps to satisfy the international community,” the report said.

WSJ, quoting unnamed sources, said Zarar Shah had, during his interrogation, also implicated other members of the Lashkar, and “broadly confirmed” the story Ajmal Amir Kasab had given Indian investigators. Kasab was captured alive near Girgaum Chowpatty on November 26.

The Sunday Express had reported on December 28 that after New Delhi shared extensive information on the attackers with visiting FBI officers, the US asked Pakistan for access to both Shah and Lakhvi, but failed to get a favourable response. Shah in particular, has been under US watch for a while now, and American investigators have been keen to confront and interrogate him.

“Pakistan's own investigation of the terror attacks in Mumbai has begun to show substantive links between the 10 gunmen and an Islamic militant group (Lashkar) that its powerful spy agency spent years supporting,” WSJ reported. “He (Shah) is singing," WSJ quoted a Pakistani official as saying. He had admitted to playing a key role in the attacks, an "admission (that is) backed up by US intercepts of a phone call between Shah and one of the attackers at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower”. Over the phone, Shah gave the attackers “advice and kept them focussed”, the report said.

Shah had corroborated Kasab's story about the terrorists having trained in PoK and then travelled by sea to Mumbai from Karachi. He had also said the terrorists spent a few weeks in Karachi, “training in urban combat to hone skills they would use in their assault,” WSJ said.

The report commented on the “big fear in the West and India” that Pakistan would ultimately release all militant leaders (like Lakhvi and Shah) as it did after taking them into custody for a few months after the 2001 Parliament attack.

“They've got the guys. They have the confessions. What do they do now?” the report quoted a diplomat as saying. “We need to see that this is more than a show. We want to see the entire infrastructure of terror dismantled. There needs to be real prosecutions this time.”