India links Pakistan to Calcutta killings

India hinted last night that Pakistan-backed terrorists were responsible for yesterday's early-morning attack on the US information centre in Calcutta, in which four guards were shot dead.

Four men on two motorbikes pulled up in front of the American Centre at 6.35am, just as the policemen stationed outside the building were changing shifts. Twenty people were injured in the attack.

One pillion rider opened fire with a Kalashnikov under his shawl. Another attacker then sprayed the police with a second automatic weapon before the four sped off into the city's nearly empty streets, the Calcutta police commissioner, Sujoy Chakraborty, said.

The wounded included police officers, pedestrians and a private security guard. Several were seriously injured.

"I just picked up my gun and tried to load it but by that time they had gone," one policeman, who was shot in the arm, said last night.

"It was pretty nasty. There was a lot of blood around," an official from the nearby British high commission said.

The massacre will do little to relax the already tense relations between India and Pakistan.

The Indian home minister, Lal Krishna Advani, claimed yesterday that the group responsible for the attack had links with Pakistan's Inter-Services intelligence agency, the ISI.

A senior leader of the group had called Indian police from Dubai to claim responsibility, he said.

He did not name the group, but the external affairs ministry spokeswoman, Nirupama Rao, named the man as Farhan, alias Aftab Malik.

"This person Farhan is believed to be in close touch with some Pakistani agencies and could have tie-ups with Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami and Harkat-ul-Mojahedin," she said, referring to groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir.

Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami, formerly the Harkat-ul-Ansar, is included on the US state department list of terrorist groups. Yesterday a spokesman for the group in Pakistan denied that it was connected with the shootings.

A caller from a local organisation, the Asif Raza Commandos, said that it was behind the attack, officials said.

Last night Pakistan furiously denied being involved.

"These are totally baseless charges. As you know, Pakistan has condemned terrorism in all its forms and manifestations," the foreign ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan declared.

Yesterday's attack was the first of its kind against US interests in India, and follows last month's attack by five men on the Indian parliament building in New Delhi, in which nine policemen died.

India blamed the incident on Pakistan and mobilised hundreds of thousands of troops on its border. The Pakistani military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, responded by sending his own army to the frontline.

Since then he has launched an unprecedented crackdown on religious extremists and militant organisations fighting Indian rule in Kashmir which had previously enjoyed Islamabad's covert support.

He also renounced terrorism in an address to the nation.

After a lull of several days, the two sides shelled each other across their disputed border in Kashmir yesterday.

Pakistan offered to ease its war footing if India started to demobilise first, but New Delhi was in no mood to talk.

The American Centre is one of two US government buildings in Calcutta, and houses the information service library, as well as the embassy's public affairs office, the press section and a cultural wing.

The centre is one of the landmarks of Calcutta. During the early days of America's bombing offensive against Afghanistan, 800 or 900 people demonstrated outside it.

After the attack on the parliament, the road leading to the US consulate was sealed off and security increased. But the centre, on a busy eight- lane road, is harder to protect.

The FBI's director, Robert Mueller, was circumspect about the attackers. He declined to call the incident an act of terrorism, adding: "I think I will describe it as a horrible tragedy and an assault on police officers. But categorising it beyond that, in the absence of the facts ... would be inappropriate at this time."

A US consulate spokesman in Calcutta refused to speculate last night whether the gunmen were attacking the American government or the Indian police.

The ambush propelled the US embassy and other American institutions in India into a state of high alert.

New Delhi's joint commissioner of police, Suresh Roy, said there were intelligence reports of a possible attack on US establishments in India during the Republic Day celebrations this Saturday.

"We have tightened the entire security arrangement at the US embassy and all US establishments," he said. "This is a serious matter. We are keeping a close watch."