India has directly accused Pakistan's intelligence services of having a direct hand in the November 2008 terror assault on the city of Mumbai. Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon said the Mumbai attack and last year's deadly suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul were planned and organized inside Pakistan by groups that receive the support from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

"The perpetrators planned, trained and launched their attacks from Pakistan, and the organizers were and remain clients and creations of the ISI," Menon said in Paris on Feb. 4, AFP reported. Menon's accusation is the first on the record statement from an Indian official accusing a Pakistani agency of involvement in Mumbai.

The 62-hour terror spree in Mumbai resulted in 165 innocent people killed and hundreds more wounded. The Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based terror group allied with al Qaeda and supported by powerful elements within Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency and the military, carried out the attack, an Indian intelligence dossier stated. The dossier contained proof of calls made between the Mumbai terrorists and their handlers inside Pakistan as the attacks were ongoing, as well as transcripts of the handlers providing information to the terrorists and ordering them to murder the civilians. The handlers were heard cheering after the murders.

Pakistan is still examining the Indian dossier but so far has been reluctant to admit links between the terrorists and Pakistan. On Jan. 30, Pakistani's high commissioner to Britain claimed the Mumbai dossier was "fabricated" and denied the attacks were plotted inside Pakistan. "Pakistani territory was not used so far as the investigators have made their conclusions," Pakistani High Commissioner Wajid Shamsul Hasan said. "It could have been some other place." Hasan's statements sparked sharp rebukes from Indian officials.

While Menon has implicated the ISI in the Mumbai assault, news from Pakistan indicates the Federal Investigation Agency has concluded that the plot originated in Bangladesh and Dubai. The FIA has concluded that the Bangladeshi branch of the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami carried out the attack with the help of Indian nationals based out of Dubai, and at least one of the attackers was a Bangladeshi.

The Bangladeshi branch of Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami Bangladesh, or HuJI-B, was established in 1992 "with assistance from Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front," according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal. The terror group espouses the same philosophy as the Taliban and is an al Qaeda in Bangladesh. HuJI-B also receives support from the Inter-Service Intelligence agency.

Elsewhere in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, 12 jihadi groups rallied in Muzaffarabad to support the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charitable front group for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Jamaat-ud-Dawa was declared a terrorist entity by the United Nations Security Council after the Mumbai attacks.

Banned terror groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, participated in the rally while Pakistani security officials stood by. "The authorities made no effort to stop the meeting, despite the ban on some of the groups taking part," BBC reported. "The only security at the conference was a line of policemen who surrounded the venue."

Jamaat-ud-Dawa / Lashkar-e-Taiba held a public rally in Lahore in January to protest Israel's military operation in Gaza. The group operated under the name of Tehreek-e-Tahafuz Qibla Awal, or the Movement for the Safeguarding of the First Center of Prayer. But the banner for the Jamaat-ud Dawa was flown and senior officials from the group addressed the crowd.