NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD: India’s home minister and other officials resigned yesterday as anger grew over intelligence failures leading up to the devastating attacks on Mumbai.

Shivraj Patil, who became highly unpopular during a long series of terror attacks across India, said he took moral responsibility for the assault by heavily armed militants, which left more than 200 people dead and transformed historic parts of Mumbai into a war zone for three days.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram was named as the new home minister. The country’s powerful national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, also submitted his resignation, but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is said to have rejected it.

With New Delhi blaming Islamabad for the carnage, the future of the Indo-Pak peace process looks grim. “There is a view in the government that India should suspend the peace process ... to show that it is not going to take lightly the deadly carnage in Mumbai,” official sources told the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency. “The government is very upset as it feels that Pakistan has not kept its promise made at the highest level to end terrorism directed at India.”

Opening all-party talks in the Indian capital, Singh said he intended to boost security, give more funds to anti-terrorism units and set up a federal agency of investigation. “We have had terrorist attacks before ... but this attack was different. It was an attack by highly trained and well-armed terrorists targeting our largest city,” the prime minister said. “They came with the explicit aim of killing large numbers of innocent civilians, including foreign visitors. They sought to destroy some of the best-known symbols of our commercial capital.”

Mumbai’s Joint Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria said Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the assault, which took thousands of Indian securitymen 60 hours to stop.

“The only gunman captured after a string of attacks, Ajmal Qasab, told us he came from Pakistan. He confessed his links to Lashkar during interrogation,” Maria told reporters. “The terrorists were from a hardcore group in the Lashkar and our interrogation indicates that the terrorists had other places that they also intended to target.”

In the wake of fresh accusations, Pakistan reiterated its demands that India produce evidence. “This is only an allegation. We have demanded evidence of the complicity of any Pakistani group,” said President Asif Ali Zardari, through his spokesman Farhatullah Babar. “We will take the strictest action against any group or individual ... if India provides us the evidence.”

As tensions flared, Islamabad began rallying support both at home and abroad. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, who canceled a trip to Hong Kong, telephoned several political leaders yesterday to brief them on the emerging crisis. “All political leaders assured the prime minister of their full support and cooperation at this critical juncture,” Gilani’s office said.

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi spoke by telephone to the foreign ministers of China and the United Arab Emirates as well as European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and told them Pakistan had promised all help to India. In an interview with CNN, he said: “My government feels good neighborly relations with India are in the interest of Pakistan. Our hands are clean and we have nothing to hide. We have promised full cooperation to India. Pakistan itself is a big victim of terrorism.”

President Zardari, battling militants at home, told an Indian television on Saturday he would cooperate in the investigation and act decisively if any Pakistani link was found. “If any evidence comes of any individual or group in any part of my country, I shall take the swiftest of action in the light of evidence and in front of the world,” he told CNN-IBN.

Pakistan says New Delhi is too hasty to blame it for attacks when India has homegrown militants. A senior Pakistani security official denied the involvement of any Pakistani institution in the Mumbai attack and said “the war on terror would not be a priority if tensions escalated.”

The next day or two would be crucial in assessing India’s response, the official, who declined to be identified, told a select group of reporters.

Lashkar was banned in Pakistan in 2002 under pressure from the US a year after Washington and Britain listed it a terrorist group. It is since believed to have emerged under another name, Jamat-ud-Dawa.

In April 2006, the US Department of State listed Jamat-ud-Dawa as a terrorist organization for being an “alias” of Lashkar.

A spokesman for Jamat-ud-Dawa in Islamabad denied any link to Lashkar and said he condemned the attack.

“We condemn the killings of civilians. We condemn such killings in a terrorist activity, and at the same time we condemn it happening in the shape of state terrorism, as we see in Srinagar, Kashmir,” Abdullah Muntazir said, referring to Indian Army atrocities in the disputed Kashmir region.