Mumbai India

Auditioning in December for the role of a Bollywood villain, Rajan Verma was asked to act like a man attacking a train or a building. He clutched a toy gun and spewed out what he hoped sounded like a venomous diatribe. Verma, 28, had no idea what the movie was about. But when the casting director handed him a black T-shirt, beige cargo pants, a blue backpack and a replica of an AK-47 assault rifle, he knew instantly.

The sophistication of Wednesday's assault in Mumbai and the targeting of U.S. and British citizens are the hallmarks of groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, but an array of other organizations have launched attacks in India and may also have played a role, officials and counter-terrorism experts said.

With India casting suspicion on Pakistani militant groups in the Mumbai attacks, analysts and diplomats warned Friday that slowly warming relations between the nuclear-armed rivals could suffer a reversal, with potentially serious repercussions for the entire region. Pakistani authorities have vehemently denied any involvement in the three-day rampage by groups of gunmen in India's commercial capital, which left at least 150 people dead.

Groups of bearded men in black blazers and wide-brimmed hats prayed aloud and chanted inside the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn on Friday, grieving the loss of friends killed in the terrorist siege in India this week. Many had not slept in two days. They had been frantically e-mailing and calling contacts around the world, searching for any word on the people being held hostage in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish center during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Alan Scherr devoted his life to meditation and the search for peaceful balance. His 13-year-old daughter, Naomi, was as bright and mischievous as her father was focused. Together they met an improbable violent death Wednesday, shot in a terrorist rampage as they shared a late dinner in the plush dining room of the Oberoi hotel in Mumbai, India.

In normal times, money drives Mumbai. And even as police detonated grenades they removed Saturday from the last redoubt of a terrorist band, residents fretted about the effects of three days of violence on the seething energy that unites rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim in India's commercial capital.

India called in a Pakistani envoy Monday and demanded that its neighbor and longtime rival take swift action after deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai that shook the nation, even as widening domestic fallout forced another top official to resign. Increasingly confident that evidence in attacks that killed at least 170 people points to the involvement of Pakistan-based groups, India also called on Pakistan to hand over 20 terrorism suspects reportedly based there, amplifying a demand made in 2002.

With a bit of pluck, even if it was not always heartfelt, a touch of defiance and a dose of the city's famous resilience, Mumbai dusted itself off Monday from last week's terrorist attacks and headed back to work. The trains were reasonably packed, traffic was beginning to resemble its normally chaotic self and shoppers eased back into the stores, even if many still weren't buying a whole lot.

A somber Israel buried Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah, on Jerusalem's Mount of Olives on Tuesday, his body wrapped in a prayer shawl, hers in a shroud. They left behind 2-year-old son Moshe, who had been with them in Mumbai, India, and many mysteries about the circumstances of their violent deaths.

Both Pakistan and India made pointed references to the right of self-defense Tuesday, the eve of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's arrival in India to try to calm tensions in the wake of the Mumbai terrorism attacks. The visit comes as Pakistan finds itself under growing pressure to come clean on what it knows about those behind last week's 60-hour attack on Mumbai that left more than 170 dead.