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JERUSALEM - A Pakistani militant group apparently used an Indian operative as far back as 2007 to scout targets for the elaborate plot against India's financial capital, authorities said Thursday, a blow to Indian officials who have blamed the deadly attacks entirely on Pakistani extremists.
As investigators sought to unravel the attack on Mumbai, stepping up questioning of the lone captured gunman, airports across India were put on high alert amid fresh warnings that terrorists planned to hijack an aircraft.
Also Thursday, police said there were signs that some of the six victims of the attack on a Jewish center may have been tortured. "The victims were strangled," said Rakesh Maria, a senior Mumbai police official. "There were injuries noticed on the bodies that were not from firing."
Members of an Israeli rescue group which had a team in Mumbai said it was impossible to tell if the bodies had been abused, however, because no autopsies were conducted in accordance with Jewish tradition.
At American University in D.C. Thursday, it was a time for people to gather together and share their grief. "It has affected not only Indians, but the entire generation of people all over the world," said Dr. Shambu Banik of Bowie State University.
In his office in D.C., Rabbi Levi Shemtov called the cell phone of his friend and colleague Gavriel Holtzberg at the Jewish Center in Mumbai. "Somebody picked up, but it wasn't Rabbi Holtzberg," he said. "It was someone who demanded who I was and what I wanted."
Shemtov said he had no idea the center had been taken over by terrorists or that Rabbi Holtzberg, his wife Rivka, and two others would eventually be killed. The Holtzberg's two-year-old son Moshe was the only one who survived.
For the first time the couple's nanny, Sandra Samuel, who was also in the center, spoke about the ordeal and how she was able to grab Moshe, who she found standing next to the body of his mother. "I was in the kitchen," Samuel said. "I came running to stop them and I saw one man was shooting at me."
"When I picked [Moshe] up he was quiet, that's why I could bring him out," she said. "I just picked up the baby and I ran."
After his parents' memorial service Monday, Moshe and Samuel boarded a jet along with the bodies of his parents and four other Jews slain at the Chabad House to fly to Israel - a place the curly-haired 2-year-old had never seen.
The wrenching scene at the service played over and over again on Israeli television as government officials, Chabad leaders and relatives prepared for the funerals of the victims and the future of the orphaned Moshe.
The Israeli air force plane landed at Israel's international airport just before midnight and Israeli officials joined relatives and friends of the victims.
Moshe's father and mother ran the headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement in Mumbai. They were among six Israeli citizens killed at the center during the city's three-day terror siege.
"I don't know that he can comprehend or that he will remember seeing his parents shot in cold blood," said Robert Katz, a New York-based fundraiser for Migdal Ohr, an Israeli orphanage founded by the boy's family.
Moshe was accompanied to Israel by his maternal grandparents, Yehudit and Shimon Rosenberg, who had flown to Mumbai on Friday. Samuel came along, too, to provide the dazed child a familiar face as he starts his new life.
"She's been there with him throughout," Katz said.
Though Samuel had no passport or papers, Moshe's granduncle, Rabbi Yitzchak David Grossman, helped arrange for her to get a visa to Israel. In a sad coincidence, Grossman is founder of the Migdal Ohr orphanage.
At the memorial service, Rosenberg struggled to deal with the deaths of his daughter and son-in-law as his grandson cried nearby. "The Lord giveth. The Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord," he said, quoting the Book of Job.
Moshe's father was a dual American-Israeli citizen and his mother was Israeli. The couple lived in Israel and New York before they moved to Mumbai in 2003.
It was unclear who would who get custody of Moshe, Chabad officials said, though the closely knit ultra-Orthodox outreach group would provide a large safety net.
The toddler has an older sibling who has Tay-Sachs, a genetic disorder that strikes Jews of eastern European origin. He is permanently hospitalized in Israel, Katz said. The couple's first-born child died of Tay-Sachs.
The Foreign Ministry said the government would arrange funerals for those killed in Mumbai and send representatives to the ceremonies, as it does for victims of terror attacks at home.
"There are going to be thousands of people at this funeral," Katz said. "This couple wasn't living in the West Bank. They weren't settlers. They weren't occupying anyone's land. They were killed because they were Jews, simple and plain."
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Associated Press writers Ramola Talwar Badam and Muneeza Naqvi in Mumbai, Ashok Sharma and Tim Sullivan in New Delhi, Biswajeet Banerjee in Lucknow and Anne Gearan in Islamabad contributed to this report.
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