NEW YORK -- The Chabad-Lubavitch movement has confirmed that a New York rabbi and his wife are among the dead in the India terrorist attack.
A spokesman, Rabbi Zalman Schmotkin, says Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, have been killed in Mumbai. They ran the movement's local headquarters, which was one of 10 sites attacked.
The couple's toddler son, Moshe Holtzberg, was taken out of the center by an employee, and is now with his grandparents.
Additionally, a father and his teenage daughter from a Virginia community that promotes a form of meditation were among those killed in the terrorist attacks in India, a colleague said Friday.
Alan Scherr, 58, and daughter Naomi, 13, were in a cafe Wednesday night in Mumbai when they were killed, said Bobbie Garvey, a spokeswoman for the Synchronicity Foundation. The U.S. State Department confirmed their deaths on Friday morning.
The Scherrs were among 25 foundation participants in a spiritual program in Mumbai. Four others on the mission were injured in the cafe attack in the luxury Oberoi hotel, Garvey said, including two women from Tennessee.
Members of the New York-based Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox Jewish movement were anxiously awaiting the names of victims at its local headquarters in Mumbai, which was one of 10 sites attacked.
Among the three people rescued from the center Thursday morning was a toddler identified as the 18-month-old son of the couple running the center, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka.
The whereabouts of the couple, who moved to India from Brooklyn, are still unknown. The bodies of five hostages were found by Indian commandoes early Friday night.
The Virginia father was a Maryland native and a former college professor who lived at the Synchronicity sanctuary about 15 miles southwest of Charlottesville.
"I would call them bright stars," Garvey said of the Scherrs. "Extraordinary, bright, very positive -- examples to the world."
The Scherrs had lived at the foundation all of Naomi's life, Garvey said. Alan Scherr's wife, Kia, and her two sons did not travel with them to India.
According to the foundation's Web site, the community is led by Master Charles, a former leading disciple of Swami Paramahansa Muktananda. He is described on the Web site as "one of the most popular spiritual teachers from India to build a following the West in the 1970s." He taught a form of yoga.
Garvey identified the Synchronicity injured as Helen Connolly of Toronto, who was grazed by a bullet; Rudrani Devi and Linda Ragsdale, both of Nashville, who both underwent surgery for bullet wounds; and Michael Rudder of Montreal, who remains in intensive care after being shot three times. Other members of the mission narrowly escaped the attack.
More than 150 people have been killed since gunmen attacked 10 sites across India's financial capital starting Wednesday night, including 22 foreigners -- two of them Americans, officials said.
Early Friday night, Indian commandos emerged from a besieged Jewish center with rifles raised in an apparent sign of victory after a daylong siege that saw a team rappel from helicopters and a series of explosions and fire rock the building and blow giant holes in the wall.
Inside, though, were five dead hostages.
A delegation from Israel's ZAKA emergency medical services unit entered the building after the raid and reported through an Indian aide that five hostages and two gunmen were dead, a ZAKA spokesman in Israel said. The spokesman had no information on the hostages' identities or whether there were wounded inside.
Jewish law requires the burial of a dead person's entire body, and the mission of the ultra-Orthodox ZAKA volunteers is to rescue the living -- and in the case of the dead, carry out the task of gathering up all collectable pieces of flesh and blood.
Numerous local media reports, quoting top military officials, also said five hostages and two gunmen had been killed in the Jewish center.
By Friday evening, at least nine gunmen had been killed, one had been arrested and as many as six were still in the Taj Mahal, said R. Patil, a top official in Maharashtra state, where Mumbai is the capital. Others said there was likely only one or two gunmen still inside. Patil said more than 150 people had been killed and 370 injured.
After hours of intermittent gunfire and explosions Friday at the Taj Mahal, a hotel with 565 rooms, the battle heated up at dusk when Indian forces began launching grenades at the hotel, where at least one militant was believed to be holed up inside a ballroom, officials said.
Commandos had killed the two last gunmen inside the nearby Oberoi earlier in the day.
"The hotel is under our control," J.K. Dutt, director general of India's elite National Security Guard commando unit, told reporters, adding that 24 bodies had been found. Dozens of people -- including a man clutching a baby -- had been evacuated from Oberoi earlier Friday.
The airborne assault on the center run by the ultra-orthodox Jewish outreach group Chabad Lubavitch was punctuated by gunshots and explosions and exchanges of fire as forces cleared it floor by floor, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.
Nearly 12 hours after the battle began, Indian troops left the building to cheers from the crowd. Mumbai Police Chief Hassan Ghaffoor said "the operation was ongoing" but in its "final stage."
Israel's ambassador to India, Mark Sofer, earlier said they believed there were up to nine hostages inside. He denied reports that Israeli commandos were taking part in the operation.
Moshe Holtzberg, a 2-year-old who was smuggled out of the center by an employee, is now with his grandparents. His grandfather told Israel Radio on Friday that he had no news of Moshe's parents.
Security officials said their operations were almost over.
"It's just a matter of a few hours that we'll be able to wrap up things," Lt. Gen. N. Thamburaj told reporters Friday morning.
The group rescued from the Oberoi, many holding passports, included at least two Americans, a Briton, two Japanese nationals and several Indians. Some carried luggage with Canadian flags. One man in a chef's uniform was holding a small baby. About 20 airline crew members were freed, including staff from Lufthansa and Air France.
"I'm going home, I'm going to see my wife," said Mark Abell, with a huge smile on his face after emerging from the hotel. Abell, from Britain, had locked himself in his room during the siege.
The well-coordinated strikes by small bands of gunmen starting Wednesday night left the city shell-shocked.
Late Thursday, after about 400 people had been brought out of the Taj hotel, officials said it had been cleared of gunmen, but they later said two to three more were still inside with about 15 civilians.
Early Friday, Thamburaj, the security official, said at least one gunman was still alive inside the hotel and had cut of electricity on the floor where he was hiding. Shortly after that announcement, another round of explosions and gunfire were heard coming from the hotel.
On Friday, India's foreign minister pointed an accusing finger across the border at rival Pakistan.
"According to preliminary information, some elements in Pakistan are responsible for Mumbai terror attacks," Pranab Mukherjee told reporters in the western city of Jodhpur.
"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. India has long accused Islamabad of allowing militant Muslim groups, particularly those fighting in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, to train and take shelter in Pakistan. Mukherjee's carefully phrased comments appeared to indicate he was accusing Pakistan-based groups of staging the attack, and not Pakistan itself.
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."
Indian home minister Jaiprakash Jaiswal said a captured gunmen had been identified as a Pakistani and Patil, the Maharashtra state official, said: "It is very clear that the terrorists are from Pakistan. We have enough evidence that they are from Pakistan."
Neither provided further details.
Pakistan's government said Friday that it will send its spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, to India to help probe the attacks.
The gunmen apparently came to Mumbai by boat, and Indian forces expanded their investigation to the sea. Authorities stopped a cargo ship off the western coast of Gujarat that had sailed from Saudi Arabia and handed it over to police for investigation, said Navy Capt. Manohar Nambiar.
They also stopped a cargo ship that had come to Mumbai from Karachi, Pakistan, but released it when nothing suspicious was found on board.
The British government, meanwhile, was investigating whether some of the attackers could be British citizens with links to Pakistan or the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir, a British security official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work.
The gunmen were well-prepared, apparently scouting some targets ahead of time and carrying large bags of almonds to keep up their energy.
"It's obvious they were trained somewhere ... Not everyone can handle the AK series of weapons or throw grenades like that," an unidentified member of India's Marine Commando unit told reporters, his face wrapped in a black mask. He said the men were "very determined and remorseless" and ready for a long siege. One backpack they found had 400 rounds of ammunition inside.
He said the Taj was filled with terrified civilians, making it very difficult for the commandos to fire on the gunmen.
"To try and avoid civilian casualties we had to be so much more careful," he said, adding that hotel was a grim sight. "Bodies were strewn all over the place, and there was blood everywhere."
A U.S. investigative team was heading to Mumbai, a State Department official said Thursday evening, speaking on condition of anonymity because the U.S. and Indian governments were still working out final details.
India has been shaken repeatedly by terror attacks blamed on Muslim militants in recent years, but most were bombings striking crowded places: markets, street corners, parks. Mumbai -- one of the most populated cities in the world with some 18 million people -- was hit by a series of bombings in July 2006 that killed 187 people.
These attacks were more sophisticated -- and more brazen.
They 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 -- the Jewish center, a tourist restaurant, one hotel, then another, and two attacks on hospitals. There were 10 targets in all.
