US President George W. Bush said he was saddened by the wave of attacks in Mumbai, in which at least five Americans lost their lives, and pledged cooperation to fight extremism.
"Laura and I are deeply saddened that at least two Americans were killed and others injured in Wednesday's horrific attack in Mumbai," Bush said in a statement made public Friday.
"We also mourn the great loss of life suffered by so many people from several other countries, and we have the wounded in our thoughts and prayers."
The statement came as the State Department announced that five US citizens had been killed in the carnage and that more Americans remained missing.
The department did not identify the victims killed in the wave of attacks by Islamic militants that left at least 195 dead, including 22 foreigners.
But earlier, the Synchronicity Foundation, a meditation community outside Charlottesville, Virginia, said two of their members, a father and daughter, had been killed at the Oberoi Hotel.
And a Jewish outreach group said a New York-based rabbi and his wife had been killed in an assault on the group's center in Mumbai.
Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, who was born in Israel and moved to New York as a child, and his Israeli wife, Rivka, were the directors of Chabad-Lubavitch of Mumbai.
Bush said his administration had been working with India and the international community "as Indian authorities work to ensure the safety of those still under threat."
"We will continue to cooperate against these extremists who offer nothing but violence and hopelessness," he said.
Earlier a White House spokeswoman said he was keeping abreast of the ongoing situation with regular updates from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has also briefed president-elect Barack Obama.
In a separate statement, Obama expressed sorrow for the victims and said the militants would not defeat India's "great democracy" or the global coalition arrayed against them.
"The United States must stand with India and all nations and people who are committed to destroying terrorist networks, and defeating their hate-filled ideology," the president-elect said.
Rice spoke with Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee for a second time Friday to discuss the situation, her spokesman Gordon Duguid said.
Bush and Rice were staying at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Senior administration officials also met Friday to discuss the situation in Mumbai and to ensure everything possible was being done to help US citizens affected, the White House said.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported on its website late Friday that there was mounting evidence that a Kashmiri-based Pakistani militant group, most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for the deadly attacks in Mumbai.
Citing unnamed intelligence and counter-terrorism officials, the newspaper said that US intelligence agencies so far had reached no firm conclusion about who was responsible for the attacks.
But they said that evidence gathered in the past two days pointed to a role for Lashkar-e-Taiba or possibly another group based in Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad, according to the report.
US and Indian officials are investigating the possibility that the attackers arrived off the coast of Mumbai in a large ship and then boarded smaller boats before initiating their attack, the paper said.
A US counter-terrorism official said there was strong evidence that Lashkar-e-Taiba had a "maritime capability" and would have been able to mount the sophisticated operation in Mumbai.
Ashley Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Washington Post that if India can prove a Lashkar-e-Taiba connection, then the stress on its relationship with Pakistan "becomes really acute."
Lashkar was one of the groups that Pakistani intelligence "favored for all its dirty work in Kashmir and elsewhere," Tellis was quoted as saying.
The Post opined in an editorial that the attacks in Mumbai may well have been calculated to set off a new Indo-Pakistani crisis because "a rapprochement with India would permit the Pakistani government to devote more military resources to the fight against terrorists."
