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BERLIN — Counterterrorism officials and experts said the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from prior terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from farthest limit the country. But they cautioned it was too soon to tell who may have masterminded the operation, despite a claim from a antecedently unknown Islamic radical group.

Officials in India, Europe and the United States said likely culprits included Islamist networks based in Pakistan that esteem received support in the exceeding from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Analysts said this week’s attacks surpassed previous plots carried out by pertaining to home groups in terms of complexity, the number of commonalty involved and their success in achieving their primary object: namely, to spread fear.

“This is a novel, horrific milestone in the global jihad,” said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst in opposition to the CIA and National Security Council and author of the book “The Search for al-Qaeda.” “No indigenous Indian collection has this make horizontal of capability. The goal is to damage the figure of India’s economic renaissance, undermine investor confidence and provoke an India-Pakistani crisis.”

Several analysts and officials said the attacks pierce the hallmarks of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, two networks of Muslim extremists from Pakistan that have hit India ahead of. Jaish-e-Mohammed was blamed for an encounter on the Indian Parliament in 2001.

Both groups have carried out a long campaign of violence in the disputed domain of Kashmir, which India and Pakistan have fought in addition for six decades. The roots of that conflict are religious: a majority of India’session population is Hindu; chiefly Pakistanis are Muslim.

A U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Lashkar-e-Taiba, that means “Army of the Pure,” and Jaish-e-Mohammed, or “Army of Mohammed,” are “the thing tribe are starting to look at. But I can’t heedfulness enough to treat it as a theory, a in operation hypothesis. It’s still too in good season for hard and fast” conclusions.

“What the Indians have in their favor,” the official added, “is that they’ve got some of these guys. It seems logical that they have power to look for to work their way back moderately quickly.” Indian officials aforesaid several gunmen were captured.

Pakistan’s government condemned the attacks and warned India against jumping to conclusions about who was responsible. Lashkar-e-Taiba issued a statement denying involvement.

India has suffered a wave of terrorist attacks in recent years, many sparked by the agency of friction between Hindu nationalists and minority Muslim groups. The shootings in Mumbai were far from the worst to strickle India’s financial capital; bombings in 1993 and 2006 both killed more than 180 people.

A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedin asserted responsibility for the attacks in e-mails sent to Indian media organizations Wednesday. Officials said they had never heard of the group.

Television footage showed the assailants were well-armed, carrying automatic rifles and backpacks filled with ammunition and grenades. Analysts said the fact that the gunmen quickly fanned from one side of to the other the city and held off Indian security forces suggested that they had received training at organized camps.