MUMBAI, India — Fire and smoke poured from the landmark Taj Mahal hotel Saturday as Indian forces battled suspected Muslim militants making a last stand inside, just hours after commandos stormed a Jewish outreach center and found six hostages dead.

More than 150 people were killed in the violence that began when gunmen attacked 10 sites across India's financial capital Wednesday night. Fifteen foreigners, including five Americans, were among the dead.

Authorities scrambled to identify those responsible for the unprecedented attack, with Indian officials pointing across the border at rival Pakistan, and Pakistani leaders promising to cooperate in the investigation. A team of FBI agents was ordered to fly to India to investigate the attacks.

With the fighting stretching into a third day, commandos killed the last two gunmen inside the luxury Oberoi hotel, where 24 bodies had been found, authorities said. Dozens of people — including a man clutching a baby and about 20 airline crewmembers — were evacuated from the Oberoi earlier Friday.

The Taj Mahal hotel was wracked by hours of intermittent gunfire and explosions that continued into Saturday morning, even though authorities said earlier that they had cleared it of gunmen. Indian forces kept up a counterattack with grenades and trading gunfire with what authorities believed was one or perhaps two militants holed up in the ballroom. TV images showed shattered windows on the building's first floor.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Germany | Japan | Virginia | France | Britain | Canada | Australia | Israel | Italy | Islam | Spain | Muslim | Pakistan | China | Alaska | Jewish | Brooklyn | Judaism | Singapore | Finland | India | Norway | Philippines | Islamabad | New Delhi | Himalayan | Channel | Mumbai | Briton | Lufthansa | Kashmir | Israel Radio | Air France | Oman | T-shirts | Taj Mahal | Arabian Sea | Maharashtra | New. | Naomi | Barak | Pakistan-based | Jodhpur | Oberoi | Chabad Lubavitch | Faber | Jewish. | Chhatrapati Shivaji | Rivka | Pranab Mukherjee | Gateway of India

CNN reported the government had cut off their live transmissions from the scene in Mumbai. Authorities have asked not to show live broadcasts of the battle because they believe the gunmen were monitoring the news. Most channels largely obliged.

The capture of the hotel would mark the end of one of the most brazen terror attacks in India's history.

PHOTOS: Mumbai reacts to attacks
AMERICAN VICTIMS: Virginia man, daughter among Mumbai terror victims
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS:Readers discuss the 'next' attack

The coordinated strikes in Mumbai, a city of 19 million on the Arabian Sea, were the most audacious yet to be seen in India.

According to the Associated Press, more than 30 terrorists entered the city by ship, then clambered into inflatable rubber rafts around 9 p.m. Wednesday, passing through the Gateway of India — a massive archway on the Mumbai waterfront built during British colonial rule.

They focused on the kind of "soft targets" that security experts have long cited as being vulnerable around the world: two luxury hotels, a cafe, a train station, a hospital and the headquarters of a Jewish group, among others.

In the most dramatic of the counterstrikes Friday morning, masked Indian commandos rappelled from a helicopter to the rooftop of the Chabad Lubavitch Jewish center as snipers laid down cover fire.

For nearly 12 hours, explosions and gunfire erupted from the five-story building as the commandos fought their way downward, while thousands of people gathered behind barricades in the streets to watch.

The assault blew huge holes in the center, and, at one point, Indian forces fired a rocket at the building.

Soon after, elated commandos ran outside with their rifles raised over their heads in a sign of triumph.

But inside the Chabad House was a scene of tragedy.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel's Channel 1 TV that the bodies of three women and three men were found at the center. Some of the victims had been bound, Barak said. "All in all, it was a difficult spectacle," he said.

Local media reports, quoting top military officials, said two gunmen were found dead in the building.

Chabad Lubavitch is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group that runs outreach centers in far-flung areas of the globe. The center in Mumbai served as a synagogue and cultural center for crowds of Israeli tourists and the small local Jewish community, the group said.

Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, a spokesman for the Chabad Lubavitch movement, said the dead Americans at the Jewish center were Holtzberg; Bentzion Chroman, an Israeli with dual U.S. citizenship; and Leibish Teitlebaum, an American from Brooklyn. Holtzberg's wife was an Israeli citizen.

Two other U.S. victims of the attack, from a Virginia community that promotes a form of meditation, were identified Friday as Alan Scherr, 58, and daughter Naomi, 13, of Faber, Va. They were killed in a cafe Wednesday night at the Oberoi, said Bobbie Garvey, a spokeswoman for the Synchronicity Foundation.

"There are still Americans at risk on the ground and we want to be very, very careful with any facts," said U.S. State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid.

The other dead were from Australia, France, Italy, Canada, Japan, Germany, Singapore and a dual British-Cypriot citizen.

By Friday evening, at least nine gunmen had been killed, one had been arrested and as many as six were still in the hotel, said R. Patil, a top official in Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed "external forces" for the violence — a phrase sometimes used to refer to Pakistani militants, whom Indian authorities often blame for attacks.

On Friday, India's foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee told reporters in the western city of Jodhpur that "preliminary information" indicated that "some elements in Pakistan are responsible for Mumbai terror attacks."

"Proof cannot be disclosed at this time," he said, adding that Pakistan had assured New Delhi it would not allow its territory to be used for attacks against India.

Earlier Friday, Pakistan's Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar, in Islamabad, denied involvement by his country: "I will say in very categoric terms that Pakistan is not involved in these gory incidents."

Sitaram Sharma, who runs a street stall, saw that horror up close.

"I've lived in Mumbai for 50 years and never seen anything like it," Sharma said still visibly shaken hours after the bloodshed.

Sharma saw two young men in T-shirts and jeans stride past his stall and open fire with assault rifles into a sidewalk cafe filled with Western tourists.

The attacks began at about 9:20 p.m. with shooters spraying gunfire across the Chhatrapati Shivaji railroad station, one of the world's busiest terminals. For the next two hours, there was an attack roughly every 15 minutes — at the Jewish center, a tourist restaurant, one hotel, then another, and two attacks on hospitals. There were 10 targets in all.

The gunmen were well-prepared, apparently scouting some targets ahead of time and carrying large bags of almonds to keep up their energy.

"This is going to be our future — the Indian state fighting terrorists," said Suba Chandran, deputy director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in the Indian capital, New Delhi. "It is going to be a long process. There is no easy solution."

Though it was unclear exactly who orchestrated the attacks, they appear to provide further evidence that the main battleground for Islamist extremists is shifting from Iraq, where violence has fallen dramatically this year, to the democracies of South Asia. Militants are inflicting heavy casualties on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, seizing control of territory from a fragile government in Pakistan and proving they can strike just about anywhere in India.

"The implication for us is that there are bad guys still out there, and we're going to have to learn how to deal with them, because our friends are getting sucked into this big-time," said Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., chairman of the House subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia.

In the past six months, terrorists have detonated bombs and killed dozens of people in several cities including New Delhi and the technology and outsourcing center of Bengaluru.

The very factors that in recent years have made India such a compelling success story — its impressive economic growth, its expanding ties with the West, its relatively open society — may be making it an irresistible target.

"India is going to have more problems in the future," said Edward Turzanski, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. "It's such a large target of opportunity."

President Bush called India's prime minister Thursday from Camp David to express "solidarity with the people of India," White House press secretary Dana Perino said. President-elect Barack Obama, spending Thanksgiving in Chicago with his family, received an intelligence briefing and spoke by phone with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The group that claimed responsibility for the attacks in an e-mail message to Indian news media — Deccan Mujahedin — was largely unknown to terrorism experts, who are divided over who its members are and where they come from.

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network has established a refuge in the mountains along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Indian officials often accuse Pakistan's military spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of orchestrating terrorist attacks inside India, particularly in the disputed region of Kashmir.

The two nuclear-armed countries almost went to war after Pakistani-backed Islamist militants attacked the Indian Parliament in December 2001, killing 12 people. After the Mumbai attacks Wednesday, Pakistan was quick to condemn the terrorists.

Christine Fair, South Asia analyst for RAND Corp., a think tank, suspects that the Mumbai terrorists are homegrown militants, bearing grievances over the way India's 140 million Muslims are treated by the Hindu majority. "This isn't India's 9/11," she said. "This is India's Oklahoma City."

Namrata Goswami, associate fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, says the attackers are domestic terrorists who sought to impress Islamist militants around the world.

"They want to establish some kind of linkage with al-Qaeda," she said. "But I don't believe it is there. The motive is very, very clear. This outfit wants to attract sponsors abroad. There's a lot of money in it."

Goswami said Indian Muslims bear plenty of grievances. They lag economically. And they have been targeted by Hindu extremists; hundreds of Muslims died, for instance, in communal riots in the Indian state Gujarat in 2002.

Other analysts, such as Sajjan Gohel, director of international security for the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London, see the attacks as part of a broader struggle to foment holy war against the West and its allies. "There could be an indigenous element," Gohel said, "but there are always transnational links, normally leading back to al-Qaeda and company in Pakistan."

Al-Qaeda has suffered heavy losses this year in Iraq, where Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told Reuters on Thursday that the war against the militant group was in its "final stages." U.S. military commanders, however, have warned that al-Qaeda is shifting operatives back to the Pakistani-Afghan border region, and it wants to show it is still capable of spectacular attacks.

"I would be stunned if (the Mumbai attacks) were not very heavily based in Pakistan," Turzanski said.

Whoever the attackers were, they caught Indian security forces unprepared. "Till now, we were greeting with glee Pakistan's incompetence in dealing with terrorism," Bahukutumbi Raman, former head of counterterrorism for India's intelligence agency, wrote on his blog after the Mumbai attacks. "We can no longer do so. We have become as clueless as Pakistan."

The killing began at Cafe Leopold, a watering hole for Western tourists who come to unwind in a dining room decorated with a picture of Elvis Presley.

Sharma, the street salesman, said he thought he heard the pop of firecrackers left over from the recent Diwali festival. They were gunshots. He saw people running and screaming. Then he spotted two gunmen picking off patrons in the cafe.

Five minutes later, the terrorists stormed the nearby Nariman House, owned by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group Chabad-Lubavitch. Three people — including the toddler son of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg — walked out.

The attackers moved onto the majestic Victorian-style Chhatrapati Shivaji train station, mowing down commuters with Kalashnikov assault rifles.

At 10 p.m. Wednesday, gunmen barged into the Oberoi luxury hotel through different doors.

Madhur Kapur was enjoying dinner with her banker husband when a lone terrorist carrying a machine gun barged into the hotel's Kandahar restaurant and told everyone to freeze.

Instead, chaos ensued. Kapur fled down a fire escape and made it downstairs to the swimming pool, where Indian security forces helped her to safety. She hasn't seen her husband since.

Since 9/11, security experts have been divided over the possibility of similar attacks in the U.S.

The unprecedented nature of the attacks in Mumbai made the potential fallout that much harder to gauge.

Geopolitical research firm Stratfor noted previous attacks in India appeared designed to stoke religious violence. "As opposed to trying to rile up extremist elements in India's Hindu and Muslim communities, the attacks in Mumbai are going after the country's tourism industry, spreading fear — thereby hitting at India's economic lifelines."

Then again, India has largely avoided massive Hindu-Muslim violence, despite the terrorist provocations.

Train attacks that killed about 200 in Mumbai in July 2006 were "devastating for everyone," said Chandran at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. "But we bounced back the next day."

Gohel at the Asia-Pacific Foundation agreed: "India is the world's largest democracy, a vast subcontinent — It has faced many atrocities in the past, and as in the past, it will simply lick its wounds and move on."

Paul Wiseman reported from Hong Kong. Thomas Frank, Richard Wolf and Douglas Stanglin reported from McLean, Va. Contributing: Wire reports.