Police: Mumbai Gunmen Came by Sea From Pakistan

In this handout photograph made available by Indian Presidential Palace, Indian President Pratibha...

In this handout photograph made available by Indian Presidential Palace, Indian President Pratibha Patil, second left wearing sari, and Maharashtra state Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, second right, are seen as they visited people who got injured in the hands of terrorists, at a hospital in Mumbai, India, Monday, Dec. 1, 2008.

(Indian Presidential Palace, HandOut/AP Photo)

The gunmen who attacked Mumbai set out by boat from Pakistan's port of Karachi, a top police official said, as the U.S. secretary of state headed Wednesday to India in Washington's efforts to defuse tension between the two nuclear rivals.

As evidence of the militants' links to Pakistan mounted, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to arrive in New Delhi as part of the U.S. effort to ensure Islamabad cooperates in the investigation and to ease any antagonism in the region.

Mumbai police commissioner Hasan Ghafoor said Tuesday that ex-Pakistani army officers trained the group — some for up to 18 months — and denied reports that 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.

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The revelations came as a senior Bush administration official said India had received a warning from the United States that militants were plotting a waterborne assault on Mumbai. The 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 by name.