FBI team in Mumbai to investigate militant attacks

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - An FBI team visited a restaurant and luxury hotel in Mumbai on Monday where Islamist militants struck last week in an attack that killed 183 people, including six Americans.

"They are here to help with the investigation," a U.S. embassy spokesman in New Delhi said.

There is growing fury at intelligence lapses many Indians believe let 10 Islamist gunmen attack Mumbai's two best-known luxury hotels and other landmarks in the city of 18 million.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to visit India on Wednesday to try and lower tensions with neighbouring Pakistan, and has urged India's nuclear-armed rival to give "absolute, total" cooperation in finding those responsible for last week's attacks.

Indian officials have said the gunmen were from an anti-India group based in Pakistan, a Muslim nation carved out of Hindu majority India in 1947.

"Our security people will cooperate in any way they can, including coming to India to offer assistance," said David C. Mulford, the U.S. ambassador to New Delhi on Saturday.

The FBI team was briefly detained at the city's Chhatrapati Shivaji airport on Sunday due to an official "miscommunication", Indian newspapers reported.

They were held back because they did not have permission for the special forensic equipment they had brought, the Economic Times said, citing airport authorities.

"They had arrived by a commercial flight. We let them go in the evening after questioning them," a customs official told the Mumbai Mirror.