The New Nation - Internet Edition

Agency, Mumbai

The siege at Mumbai's Taj Mahal hotel is over after security forces killed the remaining armed men inside the building.

The attackers were killed on Saturday, about 59 hours after they took part in a string of deadly assaults across India's financial capital.

"All (combat) operations are over. All the terrorists have been killed," Hasan Gafoor, Mumbai's police chief, said.

More than 195 people have been killed, including at least 22 foreigners, since the attackers began their co-ordinated assaults on Wednesday, officials have said. At least another 295 people have been injured.

Among the foreigners who have died are five Israelis, two Americans, two French nationals, two Australians, a German, a Japanese, a Canadian, a British Cypriot, an Italian and a Singaporean.

Police said that the attacks had been carried out by 10 people who had travelled to Mumbai, police said.

"Ten people had come, we killed nine and one has been captured alive," Gafoor said. At least three attackers and one security officer were killed in Saturday's final raid at the Taj Mahal hotel, Jyoti Krishna Dutt, the country's commando chief, said.

"Our operations will continue until we check each and every room and floor," he said.

Sniffer dogs were later taken into the hotel as security forces made a final sweep through the rooms of the building.

A day earlier, security forces took control of Mumbai's Jewish centre, Nariman House, after exchanging gunfire with attackers inside the building.

Troops found the bodies of six hostages inside the building after killing the men who had stormed the Jewish centre. Meanwhile, Pakistan on Saturday withdrew an offer to send its spy chief to India to help investigate the Mumbai terrorist attacks, damaging efforts to head off a crisis between the nuclear-armed rivals.

Indian officials have linked the attacks to "elements" in Pakistan, raising the prospect of a breakdown in painstaking peace talks between South Asian rivals that has alarmed the U.S.

However, Washington also kept up the pressure on Pakistan with a suspected missile strike on an al-Qaida and Taliban stronghold near the Afghan border that reportedly killed two people.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani insisted on Friday that his country was not involved in the carnage that left more than 190 people dead in India's financial capital.

With Pakistan promising to help identify and apprehend those responsible, Gilani's office said the head of the Inter Services Intelligence agency would go to India at the request of India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

However, Zahid Bashir, a spokesman for Gilani, told The Associated Press on Saturday that the decision had been changed and that a lower-ranking intelligence official would travel instead.

He declined to explain the about-face, which followed sharp criticism from some Pakistani opposition politicians and a cool response from the army, which controls the spy agency.

Bashir didn't say who would be making the trip or when.

India has repeatedly accused Pakistan of complicity in terrorist attacks on its soil, many of which it traces to militant groups fighting Indian rule in the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir.

Pakistan insists its support for agitation in Kashmir, where anti-India sentiment runs high, is only moral and political. But it is widely believed to have supported the militants with training and equipment.