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MUMBAI, India (CNN) -- The head of a small fishing community along the coast of Mumbai says he warned Indian police about terrorists smuggling powerful explosives months before gunmen entered through the harbor and launched a deadly siege against the city.

Angry demonstrators in Mumbai shout anti-Pakistan slogans on Wednesday.

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Based on information from the lone surviving gunman, six bombs were placed around Mumbai by the 10 attackers as they surged through India's financial capital last week, killing 179 and wounding hundred more.

Two exploded in taxis in separate parts of the city during the attacks. After the siege ended, authorities found one bomb at the Oberoi hotel and two at the Taj Mahal -- the two luxury hotels where gunmen took hostages.

On Wednesday, officials found another bomb at a train station but the timer device on the explosive was not active, said railway official K.P. Raghuvanshi.

According to Indian officials, the attackers hijacked a trawler in the Pakistani port city of Karachi -- about 575 miles (925 km) north of Mumbai -- and came ashore at Mumbai in dinghies.

The fisherman, Damoda Tandel, showed CNN a letter in which he warned Indian authorities about a tip that terrorists were using the harbor to import RDX, an explosive compound commonly used in military and industrial applications. He says police did nothing.

Police say the information Tandel gave was too vague to act upon.

Now, Tandel is angry and afraid, worried there could be more explosives planted around Mumbai -- though authorities say they believe all the bombs have been found. Still, the fisherman says the police could have prevented the gunmen from coming ashore by securing the harbor.

Under pressure to explain the lapse of security that allowed the siege to occur, India has made clear that it believes the coordinated attacks in Mumbai originated in Pakistan.

A police official leading the investigation says the attackers spent the past three months in Pakistan carefully planning their strike on India's financial capital.

Mumbai Joint Police Commissioner of Crime Rakesh Maria said the information comes from his interview with the suspect in custody, who police say is the lone surviving attacker.

Maria identified the suspect as Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 21, from Faridkot village in the Okara district of Pakistan's Punjab province. He is the son of Mohammed Amir Kasab, the police commissioner said.

Multiple law enforcement and intelligence sources familiar with the investigation said Kasab was put through a polygraph test and has also been interviewed by the FBI.

Maria said all 10 attackers were Pakistanis, which Pakistani officials have denied, blaming instead "stateless actors."

The band of gunmen attacked 10 targets in Mumbai on Wednesday night, sparking three days of battles with police and troops in the heart of the city that is the hub of India's financial and entertainment industries. Most of the deaths occurred at the city's top two hotels, The Oberoi and the Taj Mahal.

Maria said Kasab spend the past 18 months training at various camps run by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba -- a Pakistan-based terror group allied with al Qaeda. Kasab told police he joined the group, known by its acronym LeT, six months before he began training.

Pakistan banned LeT in 2002, after an attack on the Indian parliament that brought the nuclear rivals to the brink of war.

The training primarily took place in the Kashmiri city of Muzaffarabad, Maria said.

"He was told things like, 'You'll come in through this door, then go over here, then go out through that door,'" Maria told CNN. "Very, very detailed explicit instructions. The gunmen were hand-picked, but there were no examinations per se."

All of the attackers were trained in Kashmir by former Pakistani army officers, but they apparently did not know each other.

"While in the camps they all had code names," Maria said. Watch claims attackers came from Pakistan »

Kasab was trained to handle small arms as well as automatic weapons, the police commissioner said. He also received "explosives training, survival training, (and) nautical training."

During the last three months of the training, which focused on the Mumbai strike, Kasab was "shown photographs of the locations he was to target," including one of the city's main railway stations and a hospital.

Police have identified Kasab as the clean-shaven young man photographed in a black T-shirt carrying an assault rifle during the attack on Mumbai's Victoria Terminus train station, also known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST).

Maria said Kasab joined LeT because he was poor, but he expressed surprise at how easily he was "brainwashed" into joining the terror group.

LeT has denied any role in the attack. The only claim of responsibility has been in an e-mail -- which Indian police say originated in Pakistan -- from a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedeen.

Maria said he thinks LeT used the name Deccan Mujahedeen because it operates illegally in Pakistan.

He described the 21-year-old suspect as someone who would go unnoticed, with a criminal record in Pakistan for only petty theft. But he said Kasab is a cold-blooded killer.

Kasab told police investigators that he shot a small boy and, because he was crying, "He shot him again, and killed him, to shut him up," Maria said.

Kasab told the Indian investigators that the mission to strike Mumbai began on November 23 -- the Sunday before the attack -- when the attackers loaded a boat with their weapons, ammunition, and fake Indian identification documents, Maria said.

A few days later, they hijacked a Pakistani fishing vessel near Indian international waters, and used that vessel to cover most of the approximately 500 nautical miles from Lahore, Pakistan, to Mumbai, he said.

This account was confirmed by Mumbai's police chief in a news conference on Tuesday, who also cited the suspect's police interview.

Maria said, according to Kasab's account, that the 10 attackers killed the captain and the crew, left them on the boat, and headed ashore in inflatable dinghies on Wednesday, the day of the attack.

Asked if Kasab's testimony could be trusted, Maria said the suspect's description of the captain's body and the location of the attackers' satellite phone and global-positioning system matched what investigators found on the boat.

"The dead captain lay in the front of the boat face down with his throat cut hands tied behind his back," Maria said.

He also noted that the weapons used in the attack can be traced back to Pakistan.

Maria said none of the attackers were carrying their identification documents because they did not expect to return home. Watch survivor recount Mumbai horror »

The police commissioner said the operation, as described by Kasab, was unique in its planning and execution -- not just in India, but worldwide. He said he expects Kasab to provide more details in his ongoing interrogation by Indian police, who have 90 days to charge him.

They intend to charge Kasab with terrorism and seek the death penalty, which in India is carried out by hanging. They expect the whole process to take a year to 18 months.

Maria said Kasab was not being tortured for answers.

Pakistan initially said Friday that it had agreed to send its spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, on an unprecedented visit to India to share and obtain information from investigators there. Later Friday, however, Pakistani officials changed their minds and decided to send a less senior intelligence official in Pasha's place, according to a Pakistani source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It was unclear what prompted the reversal, but the Pakistani source said the Islamabad government was "already bending over backwards" to be cooperative and did not "want to create more opportunities for Pakistan-bashing." Pakistan's defense minister, Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, told reporters in Islamabad, "I will say in very categoric terms that Pakistan is not involved in these gory incidents."

Meanwhile, Indian authorities ramped up their accusations that the plot had Pakistani connections. "Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved," Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said at a news conference in New Delhi. Other Indian officials echoed the statement, but none provided details.

Evidence collected by police in Mumbai, along with intelligence gathered by U.S. and British officials, has led investigators to concentrate their focus on Islamist militants in Pakistan who have long sought to spark a war over the disputed province of Kashmir. India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over Kashmir, the battleground between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan that each country claimed soon after India's partition in 1947.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said additional evidence has emerged in the past 24 hours that points toward a Kashmiri connection. "Some of what has been learned so far does fall in that direction," the official said, declining to offer specifics.

"We have to be careful here," said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "When you posit a Kashmiri connection, that puts Pakistan on the table. That is huge, enormous, but what does it mean? It can be anything from people who were [initially] in Pakistan, to maybe people who used to be associated with someone in the Pakistani government, to any gradation you could find."

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who has sought a rapprochement with New Delhi, rejected widespread suspicions in India that Pakistani intelligence services may have supported the Mumbai gunmen. "The germs of terrorist elements were not produced in security agencies' labs in Pakistan," he said Friday.

Analysts said Pakistan's pledge to assist in the investigation and send its spy chief to India was a sign of the high stakes involved. When armed Kashmiri militants tried to take over the Indian Parliament in December 2001, the fallout was immediate, as both countries responded with a massive military buildup along their shared border.

"A Pakistani link here would be so utterly damaging, all the way around, to Indo-Pakistani relations," said Shaun Gregory, a professor of international security at the University of Bradford in England and a specialist on Pakistan. The decision to dispatch Pasha to India, he said, "does signal a determination on Pakistan's part to clarify that even if there's a Pakistani link here, that it had nothing to do with the government."

A senior Pakistani official said the idea for Pasha's visit came during a telephone conversation Friday between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. Singh, who had previously blamed the Mumbai attacks on groups "based outside the country," offered to provide evidence to Gillani.

"One way to ensure that" was to send Pakistan's intelligence chief, the Pakistani official said. "If there is evidence, share it."

Pakistani officials, responding to charges by Indian leaders that the attack was carried out by an organization with ties to Pakistan, said Friday that a senior intelligence officer would travel to India, in an apparent attempt to ease tensions between the two nuclear-armed states.

Indian officials said they believe that at least some of the gunmen reached Mumbai by sea. After an interrogation of one of the attackers, Indian intelligence officials said they suspected that a Pakistani Islamist group, Lashkar-i-Taiba, was responsible. An Indian intelligence document from 2006 obtained by The Washington Post said members of the group had been trained in maritime assault.

Authorities said that the death toll had risen to 195 as more bodies were discovered and that 295 people were wounded, in attacks on the hotels, the Jewish center and several other sites in Mumbai. Among the dead were two Americans from Virginia; the American rabbi who ran the city's Chabad-Lubavitch center and his Israeli wife; and three of their visitors, including an American man, an Israeli woman and a man with U.S. and Israeli citizenship. In all, at least 16 non-Indians have been reported killed.

Security forces killed the last gunmen holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel here early Saturday and clean-up operations around the sites that had been attacked continued through the day. 

The government used 350 security forces and 400 police officers to capture or kill the gunmen, officials announced at a news conference Saturday. On the basis of preliminary inquiry, we know that there were a total of 10 terrorists. Nine have been eliminated, one is caught," said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. "They split into teams of two for action, and there were four at the Taj."

In Washington, the White House announced that President Bush would speak about the Mumbai attacks at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time.

President-elect Barack Obama spoke Friday evening by phone with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to offer his condolences for those killed, Obama's office announced Saturday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke by telephone Friday with Obama for the third time since the attacks began to update him on information coming from India.

"These terrorists who targeted innocent civilians will not defeat India's great democracy, nor shake the will of a global coalition to defeat them," Obama said in a statement. "The United States must stand with India and all nations and people who are committed to destroying terrorist networks, and defeating their hate-filled ideology."

Deshmukh denied that there was any final statement to make about the nationality of the slain gunmen. But he said that the government was only certain that the one in their custody had confessed to being from Pakistan. He said Indian officials had no specific intelligence about an impending attack.

"The information that we get is always general, not specific. Mumbai is always on the target, it is a commercial city, it is an international city," he said. "It is a sensitive place, there is no denying that. But this kind of attack, not just on Mumbai but also on the nation, is something we did not anticipate."

Commandos who stormed the Mumbai headquarters of an ultra-orthodox Jewish group found the bodies of five hostages inside, including a New York rabbi and his wife, officials said, as a fresh battle raged at the luxury Taj Mahal hotel and other Indian forces ended a siege at another five-star hotel.

More than 150 people have been killed since gunmen attacked 10 sites across India's financial capital starting Wednesday night, including 22 foreigners - four of them Americans, officials said.

Early Friday night, Indian commandos emerged from a besieged Jewish center with rifles raised in an apparent sign of victory after a daylong siege that saw a team rappel from helicopters and a series of explosions and fire rock the building and blow giant holes in the wall.

Inside, though, were five dead hostages.

A delegation from Israel's ZAKA emergency medical services unit entered the building after the raid and reported through an Indian aide that five hostages and two gunmen were dead, a ZAKA spokesman in Israel said. The spokesman had no information on the hostages' identities or whether there were wounded inside.

Jewish law requires the burial of a dead person's entire body, and the mission of the ultra-Orthodox ZAKA volunteers is to rescue the living - and in the case of the dead, carry out the task of gathering up all collectable pieces of flesh and blood.

Numerous local media reports, quoting top military officials, also said five hostages and two gunmen had been killed in the Jewish center.

MOSCOW -- Not so long ago, a relatively young, newly elected president of Russia was presented with a proposal to amend the nation's constitution and extend the four-year term of the presidency.

His response was unequivocal. "The terms of presidential authority will not be changed under the current president," Vladimir Putin said in 2001, his second year in office, arguing that amendments to the constitution "dictated by political considerations" were dangerous. "Even in the most difficult times and times of crisis," he said, "those in power did not succumb to the temptation to correct the constitution for themselves. In the end, this was for the good." Putin repeated the pledge on the eve of his second term, saying the constitution should be left "untouched."

Now, months after leaving office and becoming prime minister, Putin is helping another relatively young, newly elected Russian president do exactly what he promised never to do himself -- rewrite the constitution to extend the presidential term. The abrupt reversal has sparked speculation in Moscow about whether Putin is preparing to take back his old job as president, and why.

Three weeks after President Dmitry Medvedev raised the issue in his first state of the nation address, lawmakers are rushing to approve the first substantive amendments to Russia's post-Soviet constitution since its adoption in 1993. The proposal would extend the presidential term to six years and that of members of the Duma, the lower house of parliament, from four years to five. A separate measure would give the Duma greater oversight over the prime minister.

Vladimir Putin says the effort to extend the presidential term to six years has "no personal dimension." (By

Given Russia's increasingly autocratic political system, there is little doubt the amendments will pass. There is also little doubt that Putin, who picked Medvedev to succeed him and remains the dominant figure in the Kremlin, is behind the plan.

In making the proposal, Medvedev said longer terms are needed to ensure that the president and members of the Duma "have enough time to put their promises into practice" between elections. Putin also endorsed the change, saying it was part of "a package to improve the structure of government."

But because the six-year term would go into effect after the next presidential vote, scheduled for 2012, many analysts contend that Putin is laying the groundwork for an early election and a return to the presidency, as soon as next year. They speculate that Medvedev could use the constitutional change as a reason to resign, triggering a special election that Putin would easily win.

Putin stepped down as president in May because the constitution barred him from seeking a third consecutive term. But nothing in the constitution prohibits a return to the presidency after an interregnum.

Appointed prime minister by Medvedev, he is still seen at home and abroad as Russia's top leader. But analysts say that there are advantages to holding the presidency and that Putin may be engineering an early return as a way to remain in power during difficult times ahead.

After presiding over nearly a decade of rapid growth, Putin now confronts the prospect of a severe economic slowdown. The stock markets are down 70 percent from their May highs, oil has fallen to $50 a barrel, and the government is struggling to defend the ruble and is spending its huge foreign-currency reserves faster than expected. As the crisis spreads to the rest of the economy, many expect public discontent to climb with unemployment and inflation.

"He knows how serious it is, and he's not sure that he will survive three more years without damaging . . . his chances of being elected again," said Nikolai Petrov, a scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "From that perspective, it makes sense to have the election sooner, and it's more attractive to have a guarantee of six years."

He added that Putin would be better positioned to ride out the crisis as president because management of the economy has traditionally been seen as the responsibility of the prime minister. Putin could take credit for the government's successes while blaming problems on his prime minister, as he has done in the past, Petrov said.

MUMBAI, Nov. 28 -- Indian army commandos struggled all day Thursday and into the early hours of Friday to regain control of two luxury hotels and a Jewish center in India's commercial capital, battling armed assailants who were part of a group that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said was "based outside the country."

The coordinated attacks against well-known symbols of India's prosperity and places where Westerners and Israelis gather left at least 125 people dead and more than 320 wounded, authorities said, and transformed parts of Mumbai into a smoldering war zone. Dozens of people remained trapped in the vast hotels, although it was unclear how many gunmen were still inside.

Indian police and terrorism experts said they were uncertain who had carried out the attack, but Singh, in a nationally televised address, used phrases usually taken here to mean Pakistan, raising fears that the violence in Mumbai could raise tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.

"The group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country," Singh said. "We will take up strongly with our neighbors that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if suitable measures are not taken by them."

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, said his government condemned the attacks in Mumbai. "It is unfair to blame Pakistan or Pakistanis for these acts of terrorism even before an investigation is undertaken," Haqqani said in a statement. "Instead of scoring political points at the expense of a neighboring country that is itself a victim of terrorism, it is time for India's leaders to work together with Pakistan's elected leaders in putting up a joint front against terrorism."

Arriving ashore in what police said were at least two rubber dinghies, groups of college-age men on Wednesday roamed the streets of Mumbai with automatic assault rifles and backpacks filled with ammunition and explosives, shooting up crowded places and taking hostages in hotels. One video shown again and again on television depicted the almost giddy face of a young gunman walking down the street with an AK-47 assault rifle.

The attackers struck targets in addition to the hotels and the Jewish center, including a movie theater, a hospital, a railway station, a cafe popular with foreigners and several other sites in the heart of Mumbai.

A British businessman, Rakesh Patel, who escaped the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, told television stations that two young men with a machine gun forced 15 hostages onto the hotel roof and told them that "they wanted anyone with British or American passports."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Robert McInturff said three Americans were among those injured in the Mumbai attacks, the Associated Press reported. He said there was no indication that any U.S. citizens had been killed. The Web site of the Synchronicity Foundation, a Faber, Va.-based spiritual organization whose members were staying at one of the hotels, said two Americans in the group were feared dead and two Americans and two Canadians had been wounded by gunfire.

Five non-Indians -- an Australian, a Briton, a German, an Italian and a Japanese -- were reported killed.

"All we can say now is this is the worst, most brazen, audacious attacks in Indian history because people were shooting openly on the street," police official A.K. Sharma said. He spoke Thursday at the funeral of a police inspector who was killed while trying to stop gunmen at the train station. "It's a violent situation that's still ongoing. Mumbai remains at war."

As the sun set Thursday, some hostages unfurled "Save Us" banners from the windows of the Taj, across from the Gateway of India monument and Mumbai's waterfront. Others emerged from upper-story windows using bedsheets tied together as ladders. Earlier in the day, at least four bodies and dozens of freed hostages were taken out of the hotel -- a castlelike, 1903 landmark that was set on fire during the attacks.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed to help start a nuclear energy program in Venezuela and then departed for Cuba Thursday in a tour aimed at restoring ties that have dwindled since the Cold War.

Medvedev used his visit to Venezuela -- the first by a Russian president -- to raise Russia's profile in Latin America and deepen trade and military ties. Chavez denied trying to provoke the United States, but he welcomed Russia's growing presence in Latin America as a step away from U.S. influence toward a "multi-polar world."

The two leaders toured a Russian destroyer docked in a Venezuelan port, one of two large Russian warships that arrived this week for training exercises in the first deployment of its kind in the Caribbean since the Cold War.

Chavez saluted the captain, and while touring the vessel joked to reporters from the deck: "We're going to Cuba!" The warships will hold joint exercises with Venezuela's navy next week.

Business deals also were high on Medvedev's agenda: Russia pledged to help Venezuela with oil projects and building ships, while Chavez's government signed a deal to buy two Russian-made Ilyushin Il-96 passenger jets to add to the state airline's fleet for long-range flights.

Wednesday's accords included a pledge of cooperation on peaceful nuclear energy.

Moscow plans to develop a nuclear cooperation program with Venezuela by the end of next year, said Sergei Kiriyenko, head of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency.

"We are ready to teach students in nuclear physics and nuclear engineering," he said. He said the help would include "research and development" and "looking for uranium in the territory of Venezuela."

Chavez says Venezuela hopes to build a nuclear reactor for energy purposes.

Medvedev also said Russia is ready to "think about participating" in a regional socialist trade bloc led by Chavez, likely as an associate member.

Chavez launched the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, named after South American independence hero Simon Bolivar, as an alternative to U.S.-backed free-trade pacts.

Cuba is the last stop on a four-nation tour, which also included visits to Peru and Brazil and talks in Caracas with Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega.

Medvedev said he also discussed the global financial crisis with Chavez, and "exchanged different ideas of what actions to take in this situation." Chavez blames the financial crisis on U.S. free-market capitalism.

Venezuela has bought more than $4 billion in Russian arms, including Sukhoi fighter jets, helicopters and 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles.

Medvedev pledged to keep supplying Chavez with weapons, saying Russia has a "pragmatic relationship" with Venezuela and the arms sales aren't meant to threaten any country.