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WASHINGTON - Friends and colleagues of the five Americans killed in a wave of attacks in Mumbai expressed shock and sorrow on Saturday as President George W. Bush promised US support for India as it recovers from the assault that left 195 dead.
On websites and in interviews, mourners grappled with how several of the US victims had met such a violent end when they had devoted their lives to spiritual work with peaceful goals.
"It's an unbelievable tragedy that he should be struck down by terrorists when his whole life was about creating peace," said Marcia Kaspark, the former wife of Alan Scherr, who was gunned down along with his teenage daughter, Naomi, at a hotel in Mumbai.
"His whole life was about spirituality," she told the Washington Post.
Scherr, 58, had reportedly left his career as an art professor to follow transcendental meditation and became a follower of a mystic based in Virginia, who set up the Synchronicity Foundation.
He had traveled to Mumbai on a pilgrimage with his daughter, 13, who had grown up at the group's secluded, rural compound.
"Alan and Naomi were amazing, bright lights in the world," wrote Dave Swartz on a website set up for tributes to the two victims.
In New York, members of the Jewish outreach group, the Chabad-Lubavitch Movement, described Gavriel Holtzberg, a young rabbi killed in Mumbai, as a selfless, humble man who had built up a bustling Jewish center in the Indian city.
Holtzberg, who was born in Israel and moved to New York as a child, and his Israeli wife, Rivka, were the directors of the group's center in Mumbai that came under attack by the Islamic militants.
"This news is fresh and the wound is raw," Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, chairman of educational and social services for the Chabad-Lubavitch Movement, said on Friday.
"Words are inadequate to express our outrage and deep pain, at this tragic act of cold-blooded murder of innocent men, women and children, fueled by causeless hatred," he said.
A former seminary classmate, Rabbi Dovid Zaklikowski, said Holtzberg had made great progress in expanding the center in Mumbai, serving local and visiting Jews, but was modest about his accomplishments.
"He was a private individual. He did not say, Oh, I made these great things,'" Zaklikowski, 27, told The New York Times.
As efforts continued in Mumbai to account for Americans and others still missing in the attacks, US officials were examining the fall-out on India-Pakistan relations and who was behind the carefully organized assaults.
President George W. Bush expressed his condolences for the victims and said terror would not have the "final word."
"We pledge the full support of the United States as India investigates these attacks, brings the guilty to justice and sustains its democratic way of life," Bush said on the south lawn of the White House after returning from the Thanksgiving holiday.
"The killers who struck this week are brutal and violent, but terror will not have the final word," said Bush, in his first statement before television cameras on the attacks.
"As the people of the world's largest democracy recover from these attacks, they can count on the world's oldest democracy to stand by their side."
Bush said that president-elect Barack Obama, who takes office on January 20, had been kept informed of the latest developments.
A US counter-terrorism official meanwhile told AFP that a militant group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, possibly Lashkar-e-Taiba, may have been responsible for the deadly wave of attacks in Mumbai.
"Some of the things that have been learnt thus far do point in the direction of a Kashmiri connection," said the counter-terrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "But it's still too early for definitive conclusions."
"At this point people are looking very hard at the Lashkar-e-Taiba," which is based in Pakistan and fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. The group is notorious for a deadly assault on the Indian parliament in 2001 that pushed New Delhi and Islamabad to the brink of war.
The US counter-terrorism official declined to give more details, citing the ongoing investigation.
Lashkar-e-Taiba has denied any responsibility for the assault.
- AFP /ls
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