New York, December 31 2008: Top Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Zarar Shah captured in the crackdown on militants earlier this month in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir has confessed the group's involvement in terror attacks in Mumbai, a media report said on Wednesday.

Shah has also implicated other LeT members, and had broadly confirmed the confession made by the sole captured terrorist Ajmal Kasab to Indian investigatorsthat the 10 assailants trained in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and then went by boat from Karachi to Mumbai, the Wall Street Journal reported quoting a senior Pakistani security official.

Pakistani security officials were quoted as saying that a top Lashkar commander, Zarar Shah, has admitted a role in the Mumbai attack during interrogation.

The paper said Pakistan's own investigation of the terror attacks in Mumbai have begun to show substantive links between the Lashkar and 10 gunmen who took part in the Mumbai mission.

The paper quoted a person familiar with investigation as saying that Shah also admitted that the attackers spent at least a few weeks in Karachi, training in urban combat to hone skills they would use in their assault.

"He is singing," the security official said of Shah.

The admission, the official told the paper, is backed by US intercepts of a phone call between Shah and one of the attackers at the Taj hotel, the site of a 60-hour siege.

The disclosure, it said, could add new international pressure on Pakistan to accept that the attacks, which left over 180 dead in Mumbai, originated within its borders and to prosecute or extradite the suspects.

A second person familiar with the investigation was quoted by the Journal as saying that Shah told Pakistani interrogators that he was one of the key planners of the operation, and that he spoke with the attackers during the siege to give them advice and keep them focused.

Shah, the paper said, was picked up along with fellow Lashkar commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi during the military camp raids in PoK.

The probe, the Journal said, also is stress-testing an uncomfortable shift under way at Pakistan's spy agency ISI and the government since the election of civilian leadership replacing the military-led regime earlier this year.

Military and intelligence officials, the report says, acknowledge they have long seen India as their primary enemy and Islamist extremists such as Lashkar as allies.

But now the ISI is in the midst of being revamped, and its ranks purged of those seen as too soft on Islamic militants.

That revamp and the Mumbai attacks are in turn putting pressure on the civilian leadership, which risks a backlash among the populationand among elements of ISI and the militaryif it is too accommodating to India.

"The ISI can make or break any regime in Pakistan," retired Gen.

Mirza Aslam Beg, a former army chief, was quoted as saying.

"Don't fight the ISI." The delicate politics of the Mumbai investigation, the Journal said, have given the spy agency renewed sway just when the Government was trying to limit its influence.

A Western diplomat told the paper that the question now is what Pakistan will do with the evidence it is developing.

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