Pakistan has expressed concern about rising tensions with India following allegations that gunmen who attacked Mumbai this week had Pakistani links.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari offered full co-operation with India and his government denied any involvement in the deadly attacks. Wednesdays gun and bomb assault on Indias commercial capital left at least 195 people dead and 295 injured. Troops killed the last of the gunmen at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel on Saturday. As few as 10 militants may have been involved in the assault which saw attacks in multiple locations including two hotels, a major railway station, a hospital and a Jewish centre.

9/11 for India

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said the strain in relations with India was serious but he hoped the crisis could be defused Speaking after an emergency cabinet meeting in the capital Islamabad, he told reporters: "Let us not fool ourselves, it is a serious situation when the people in India feel this is 9/11 for India. "I think as a responsible elected government, we cannot be oblivious of the seriousness of the situation." He pledged that intelligence officials would fully co-operate with the Indian investigation but added that the countrys intelligence chief would not travel to India as earlier reported, something he called a "miscommunication".

A senior security official said Pakistan had now received preliminary evidence from India, the BBCs Barbara Plett reports from Islamabad. But he warned that if India started to mobilise troops, Pakistan would respond in kind, even if that meant pulling soldiers away from fighting Islamist militants on the Afghan border. He said the next 48 hours would be crucial in determining to what level tensions would escalate. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said earlier he believed that a group based outside India was behind the killings and senior Indian politicians have said the only surviving gunman to be captured is from Pakistan.

A claim of responsibility for this weeks attacks was made by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen - a reference to a mainly Muslim region of India. According to a statement leaked to Indian newspapers, the one alleged militant captured alive, named as Azam Amir Qasab, said the Mumbai militants had received training from an Islamist group once backed by Pakistani intelligence, Lashkar-e-Toiba. Pakistan banned the group in 2002 at US insistence.