Mumbai police said that the death toll had risen to 155 and was likely to rise again. They also said 283 people had been wounded.

Mumbai police said that the death toll had risen to 155 and was likely to rise again. They also said 283 people had been wounded. Most of the dead were apparently Indian citizens, but at least 22 foreigners were killed, including at least five Americans. Among the dead were a rabbi from Brooklyn and his wife, who ran a Jewish center that was one of at least 10 sites the militants attacked in their rampage beginning Wednesday night. Just 10 gunmen, the city’s police commissioner said, had caused all the mayhem. “With confidence I can say that 10 terrorists came in,” the commissioner, Hasan Gafoor, said Saturday in the first official indication of the size of the terrorist contingent. “We killed nine of them, and one was captured alive.” Earlier reports had suggested that the 10 joined a team of assailants already in Mumbai.Around dawn on Saturday, gunfire began to rattle inside the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, where the last knot of attackers was still battling Indian commandos. None of the terrorists had issued any manifestoes or made any demands, and it seemed clear that they intended to fight to the last. It wasn’t long before flames were roaring through a ground-floor ballroom and the first floor of the Taj, a majestic 105-year-old hotel in the heart of southern Mumbai. But by midmorning, after commandos had finished working their way through the 565-room hotel, the head of the elite National Security Guard, J. K. Dutt, said the siege at the Taj was over. Three terrorists, he said, had been killed inside. Mr. Gafoor said security forces were still combing through the hotel on Saturday afternoon and it was expected that they would find more bodies. One commando leader said earlier that his team had come across a single room in the Taj containing a dozen corpses or more. With the battle over, Indian Army troopers outside the hotel could begin to relax. They took pictures of each other with their cell phone cameras and, flashing broad smiles, gave the thumbs-up sign to onlookers. The brazen and well-coordinated assault, which lasted more than 60 hours, has thoroughly shaken Mumbai, the financial and entertainment capital of India. The attacks have rattled India as well, raising tensions with neighboring Pakistan and prompting questions about the failure of the authorities to anticipate the tragedy or to react swiftly enough as it unfolded. For the first time, after veiled accusations that Pakistan was involved in the assault, Indian officials specifically linked the attacks to their neighbor and longtime nemesis. India’s foreign minister blamed “elements in Pakistan,” spreading the repercussions of the attacks beyond India’s borders.
American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday that there was mounting evidence that a Pakistani militant group — Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has long been involved in the conflict with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir — was responsible. Pakistan has denied any involvement, and the government had offered to send the head of its spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence directorate, to India to assist in the investigation of the attacks. But news agencies reported Saturday that Pakistan would instead send a lower-ranking official.
A spokesman for the Pakistani prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, gave no reason for the change, agencies reported, nor did he say when a visit might take place.
The Indian authorities also were beginning to face sharp questions about why operations to flush out a handful of assailants at the Jewish center and the Taj had not moved more rapidly. And many other basic questions remained for a crisis that unfolded so publicly, on televisions, Web sites and Twitter feeds across the world. Who were the attackers? And how could so few of them have created such havoc?
A glimpse of the desperation and fear that the attack created could be seen Saturday at the back of the seven-story Taj: Bedsheets that had been knotted together hung from a number of broken windows. One chain of sheets, dropped from a sixth-floor window, reached less than halfway to the ground.