Krittivas Mukherjee

India's defence minister said on Friday that Pakistan was still failing to crack down on militants blamed for the Mumbai attacks.

In a government morgue in Mumbai lie the bodies of nine Islamist militants responsible for killing 179 people in a bloody attack on Mumbai.

The gunman captured during the attacks on Mumbai said he had undergone months of commando-style training in a Islamist militant camp in Pakistan.

Commandos stormed a Jewish centre and a luxury hotel in Mumbai on Friday to retake them from Islamist militants on the third day of attacks.

Indian commandos stormed a Jewish centre in Mumbai on Friday evening, killing two Islamist gunmen but failing to save five hostages.

Heavy gunfire erupted on Friday after Indian commandos were dropped by helicopter on to the roof of a Jewish centre in Mumbai.

Police officers trawled slums in India's capital on Sunday rounding up suspects, after serial bombings in the city a day earlier killed at least 20.

The Olympic torch was paraded through India's capital on Thursday, along a historic thoroughfare purged of spectators, as 15 000 police officers kept protesters from the world's largest community of exiled Tibetans far from the route. Across India, thousands of mainly Tibetans protested.

The United Nations's nuclear watchdog head begins a long scheduled trip to India on Monday that has turned into a political flashpoint as a nuclear energy deal with the United States threatens to spark snap elections. The trip comes as India faces an informal end-October deadline to begin securing clearances to clinch the nuclear energy deal.

The first sight for anyone flying into India's richest city is a sea of corrugated and tarpaulin-covered roofs beside a narrow, filth-choked river. It is an aerial view of Dharavi, considered Asia's biggest shantytown, two square kilometres of open sewers, muddy lanes and ramshackle tenements that is home to almost a million people.

A network of HIV-positive people in India has launched a campaign against illegal clinics and quacks who cheat patients with the promise of curing Aids. Patients often end up going to quacks who use fake herbal treatments because the health system is widely seen as offering poor treatment while private care is costly.

At least 31 people, mostly worshippers at weekly Islamic prayers, were killed and up to 75 injured in a series of explosions in a Muslim-majority town in western India on Friday, police said. The blasts came days after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that intelligence agencies had warned of more terrorist attacks across the country.