India police: Mumbai attackers were part of larger terrorist cell

India police on Tuesday said that the 10 terrorists who carried out last month's attacks in Mumbai were part of a group of 30 recruits chosen for suicide missions, according to a report in The New York Times.

The report also said that Mumbai police do not know the whereabouts of the other 20 terrorists, all of whom are members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group responsible for the attacks on 10 sites that killed 171 people. Police said there is no reason to believe the terrorists are in India, but that possibility does exist.

"Another 20 were ready to die," Deven Bharti, a Mumbai Police deputy commissioner, told The New York Times. "This is the very disturbing part of it."

Police have maintained that only 10 gunmen were involved in the Mumbai attacks that resulted in escalated tensions between nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan.

Pakistan's prime minister confirmed on Wednesday the arrests of two men reportedly wanted by India in connection with the Mumbai attacks.

Yousuf Raza Gilani told reporters Wednesday that Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and Zarar Shah were in Pakistani custody and were being investigated.

It was the first official confirmation by Pakistan that Lakhvi was under arrest. Officials have said Lakhvi was arrested Sunday in a raid on a militant camp close to the Indian border.

India alleges he is one of the masterminds of last month's attacks.

Indian media reports have identified Zarar Shah as another suspect in the assaults. Gilani gave no more details on his arrest.

Bharti said that Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the sole terrorist to survive the attacks, provided information about the 20 additional recruits and told police that they underwent highly specialized training.

After Kasab and his nine fellow recruits were selected by Lashkar-e-Taiba, they were sequestered for three months in a house, Bharti said. During that time, the 10 were spilt into pairs, each of which was assigned a specific target in Mumbai, and they were forbidden from sharing information. After they entered the house, Bharti said, they never again saw the other 20 recruits.

Police said that the men had aliases, and they knew each another only by those aliases during their training. Only in the final days before the attack, did they learn their comrades' true names, Rakesh Maria, Mumbai's joint police commissioner told The New York Times.

Additional details about the Mumbai terrorists and information about the weapons and communication and navigation systems they had at their disposal were also disclosed Tuesday by police.

Investigators had already identified two of the attackers: Pakistanis Kasab and Ismail Khan.

Police also released photographs of the terrorists, five of which were taken from identification cards and three more of which were taken at the morgue following the attacks. One of the terrorists was burned beyond recognition.

Commissioner Maria told reporters that each attacker carried a dozen grenades, a 9-millimeter handgun with two 18-round clips, an AK-47, seven to nine 30-round magazines and more than 100 rounds of loose ammunition.

Maria also said that the terrorists had apparently been trained to conserve ammunition so as to fight security forces for a longer time. "They fired only in short bursts," he said.

Police said the terrorists also used GPS technology to navigate to Mumbai by sea and also to locate their targets. So far police have recovered four of the GPS handsets used by the terrorists, along with nine cell phones used during the attacks.