NEW DELHI AND ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — A hoax caller claiming to be India's foreign minister threatened Pakistan's president with war during the final hours of the Mumbai attacks, prompting Islamabad to put its air force on its highest alert for nearly 24 hours, a news report said Saturday.
Meanwhile, Indian authorities reported the first arrests since the end of last month's siege in India's commercial and entertainment capital, which killed more than 170 people. Police said they had detained two men, one in New Delhi and one in the eastern city of Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, who owned the cellphone cards that were later used by the attackers.
Indian police have been interrogating the lone captured suspect, a young man they have identified as Ajmal Amir Kasab, who they say is from the Pakistani village of Faridkot. Pakistani officials have expressed doubt that the man is a Pakistani, but Britain's Observer newspaper reported today that it had obtained voter registration rolls and the national identity card numbers of the man's parents, confirming that he was from the village, which is in the Punjab province.
The hoax call and subsequent air force alert, reported by Pakistan's English-language Dawn newspaper, underscored the volatile atmosphere between the nuclear-armed neighbors during the 60-hour Mumbai rampage by gunmen that began the night of Nov. 26. Relations have remained tense.
The report also seemed certain to raise new questions about the competence of Pakistan's government, elected less than a year ago. It has been criticized for promising to send the chief of its main spy agency to help India in the investigation, then reneging after objections from the opposition and the security establishment.
The Dawn account said it took the intercession of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others to establish that the Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, had not made the call to President Asif Ali Zardari threatening military action on the night of Nov. 28.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman, Lou Fintor, said he was not aware of such an incident. Pakistan's Information Ministry said in a statement that the call in question was put through because it was believed to have come from a recognized exchange within India's Foreign Ministry.
A Western diplomat and a Pakistani security official confirmed the broad outlines of the Dawn account.
