Mumbai Death Toll Lowered to 174

But J.K. Dutt, director general of India's elite commandos, brushed off criticism that his unit, which had to fly from New Delhi to Mumbai, was slow to respond to the attacks.

"There was no delay," he told reporters Sunday.

But Patil, the former home minister, succumbed to the mounting criticism of the government's inability to prevent repeated terrorist attacks. To replace him, Singh tapped Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, a Harvard-educated lawyer who has been one of the most prominent faces in the administration.

Chidambaram, 63, served as Minister of Internal Security in the 1980s under slain Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Authorities say the gunmen may have arrived in Mumbai on a trawler that was found abandoned and drifting off the coast with a bound corpse aboard a day after the attacks started.

The government suspects they then transferred to a dinghy and docked at a fishermen's colony near the two hotels and Jewish center targeted in the assaults.

Local fishermen were suspicious of the group of young men, police inspector Dattatray Rajbhog said.

"The fishermen shouted at them and asked who they were and where they had come from. But they abused them and fled," he said.

Suspicions in Indian media quickly settled on the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, long seen as a creation of the Pakistani intelligence service to help wage its clandestine war against India in disputed Kashmir.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said some "signatures of the attack" were consistent with Lashkar and Jaish-e-Mohammed, another group that has operated in Kashmir. Both are reported to be linked to al-Qaida.

President George W. Bush pledged full U.S. support for the investigation, saying the killers "will not have the final word." FBI agents were sent to India to help with the probe.

It was the country's deadliest terrorist act since 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai killed 257 people.

Associated Press writers Ravi Nessman, Ramola Talwar Badam, Erika Kinetz and Anita Chang contributed to this report from Mumbai, and Foster Klug and Lara Jakes Jordan contributed from Washington.