LONDON, England - Wednesday saw no dramatic developments in the investigation but instead witnessed a steady drip of reports and information about what happened and how.

Up to twenty people were arrested but none of the gunmen responsible for the attack were apparently among them. 

Many have commented on the apparent ease with which the gunmen melted away into the city after the attack, and suggested this points to them receiving assistance from rogue elements within the military or the intelligence structure. While there may or may not have been collaboration of this kind, it's a mistake to make this assumption on this piece of evidence alone.

It's easy, for instance, to forget that the men who tried to bomb London on July 21st, 2005 were also able to make good their escape and hide undetected for days. Some of those men, remember, were escaping, unarmed, from busy underground railway stations. It was six days before the Met police had the first would-be bomber under arrest, and detectives in London had all the benefits of the city's massive CCTV infrastructure at their disposal. Lahore, it seems safe to suggest, and notwithstanding the new video out Wednesday evening, is not quite so well endowed with surveillance cameras.

What's more interesting is the number of reports now suggesting that the gunmen were carrying far more arms and ammunition than would be needed to execute an ambush only. Add to that the multiple reports they were also carrying dried fruit, nuts and water bottles in their rucksacks, and it does seem to point towards the possibility they had intended taking the Sri Lankan cricket team hostage. This possible scenario, of course, provides further similarities with the Mumbai attack three months ago.

Perhaps predictably, there have been growing voices blaming India for Tuesday's attack. Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan's military intelligence agency, has described it as "all too obviously the handiwork of Indian intelligence." Meanwhile, Pakistan's serving Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, has said he does not "rule out a foreign hand." Foreign hand is code for India, of course.

It's not surprising that Pakistan's government might wish to point the finger abroad. At home and around the world, it has been slammed over this security failure. Whether or not individual police officers did their duty on the day – and one can understand why suggestions they did not have hurt when six police were killed in the attack – it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that the ruling party's squabble with its political rivals might also have played a part in the failure. 

Last month saw the dismissal of the provincial government in Punjab – of which Lahore is the capital – run by the party of Nawaz Sharif, the main nationwide opposition figure to President Asif Ali Zardari. Along with the outgoing administration, the most senior figures in the province's police force were also removed from their jobs. Faced, then, with a major security challenge – policing an international cricket match – it seems some of the main men responsible were still getting their feet under their new desks.

LONDON, England - It's just hours since the attack in Lahore but on one thing most observers seem clear. The real target of the attack was not the Sri Lankan cricket team, but the Pakistani government. Terror operations like this are aimed at creating maximum international impact, and sport finds itself increasingly in the crosshairs of global terrorism. No sport is more popular in Pakistan than cricket.

A video grab shows a suspected gunman near Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, Pakistan, Tuesday.

The only reason Sri Lanka were touring Pakistan at all was because the Indian team had pulled out of its planned tour, citing security reasons. After receiving assurances over the team's safety, Sri Lanka stepped in at the last minute. It will surely be the last team to visit the country for the foreseeable future.

That means a loss of prestige and income for Pakistani cricket, and further reinforcement overseas of the idea that Pakistan is not a safe place to visit or to do business. That's just the sort of outcome the attackers will have wanted, and just what the Pakistani government is so desperate to avoid.

The operation certainly appears to have been very well planned, if not, perhaps, entirely well executed, if reports about some of the attackers' weapons failing turn out to be correct.

It seems as though about a dozen gunmen were involved - a large number of people to coordinate in a single operation. The convoy carrying the cricketers was ambushed at a roundabout on its route from the team hotel to the stadium. It was not the opening day of the Test match, but day three - suggesting reconnaissance might have been carried out over the past two days about the route taken by the team bus.

The attackers carried an impressive arsenal of assault rifles, grenades and rocket launchers. "These people were highly trained and highly armed," said the province's governor. "The way they were holding their guns, the way they were taking aim and shooting at the police, it shows they were not ordinary people," he added.

While it appears that that some grenades failed and the rocket launcher failed to hit a target, all of the attackers appear to have escaped successfully after a gunfight with police and security lasting 15 minutes.

So who did it? It seems reasonably safe to rule out the Sri Lankan separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in this attack. The Tamil Tigers have been engaged in a bloody civil war in the north of Sri Lanka for decades. But it's suffered a series of defeats in recent months at the hands of the Sri Lankan army, and most commentators believe the group just does not have the capability to mount such a complex, well-coordinated attack like this on foreign soil.

Instead, the focus surely falls on one, or perhaps several, of the jihadist-terrorist groups based on Pakistani soil. One such group is the Tehrik-e-Taleban, the Pakistani Taliban movement led by Baitullah Mehsud from the tribal areas in the west of Pakistan. It was blamed for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. And it's been linked with the truck bomb attack on the Marriot hotel in September last year, which killed more than 50 people.

Some initial accounts lend possible support to this being the work of the same group. Lahore's police chief said the men who took part looked like Pashtuns, the ethnic group that hails from the tribal regions close to the Afghan border, the stronghold of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But some commentators question this. Sajjan Gohel, of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, points out that the Pakistani Taliban, or groups allied to it, have never struck this far from their base in the tribal areas. Taliban-linked attacks also tend to be more rudimentary in nature, and not as sophisticated as Tuesday's ambush, Gohel says.

Certainly, it's striking that this operation was not a suicide bomb attack but one instead carried out by what appear to be highly trained gunmen. It's also perhaps worth noting that they were casually dressed in jeans and jackets. Both these point to similarities with last year's attack in Mumbai, when 10 gunmen laid siege to two hotels and other locations over a period of three days.

That operation has been widely blamed on another jihadist-terrorist organisation, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT), a group with links to al Qaeda. Unlike the Taliban groups, LeT has its roots not in Afghanistan but in the conflict with India over the disputed region of Kashmir. Even though it would be unusual for LeT to stage an attack within Pakistan, there are good reasons why it may wish to do so now.

Under intense international pressure after the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani officials arrested a series of LeT leaders. Interior Minister Rehman Malik then made the unprecedented move of publicly acknowledging that the Mumbai operation had been in part staged from Pakistan.

Never before had Pakistan made such an admission over an attack in neighboring India, and there are some within Pakistan's military and security apparatus who will not have been pleased to hear it. Many security analysts say those are the people who believe destabilizing India is a strategic objective. They're also the people who in the past helped set up groups like LeT to fight in Kashmir.

Whoever carried out the attack, it certainly represents the most significant challenge to date from within Pakistan to the survival of the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Two UK terror trials came to an end this week.

Al Qaeda operatives used invisible ink to write down key phone numbers. This pen was found by police during a house search

On Tuesday, a jury in London convicted Bilal Abdulla of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. Abdulla was one of two people who tried to detonate car bombs in London and then, on a suicide mission, drove a jeep filled with gas canisters into Glasgow airport. His partner, Kafeel Ahmed, died in the second attack.

The trial rightly received plenty of coverage. But the case itself failed to open up much, if anything, in the way of links to Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organisation. It was, it appears, a stand-alone operation.

Far more interesting, I think, was the result from Manchester this afternoon. For the first time in the UK, a jury convicted a man, Rangzieb Ahmed,  of directing terrorism. Not only that, they also convicted him, and his co-defendant, Habib Ahmed, no relation, of belonging to Al Qaeda.

We talk a great deal about people or plots being AQ-linked or AQ-inspired. Well here's a case, according to Greater Manchester Police head of counterterrorism, Tony Porter, that's indisputably AQ-core.

In many ways, the Manchester case was the polar opposite of the London one. It didn't have any plot or planned attack per se, but it had links to all manner of interesting people and plots. 

Here's a few:

Phone links between Rangzieb Ahmed and Yassin Omar, one of the failed London bombers.

Habib Ahmed named as a fellow traveller by Mohammed Junaid Babar, the supergrass whose testimony helped convict the fertiliser bomb plotters in May 2007.

Phone links with Abdul Rahman, who pled guilty last year to recruiting people in the UK to go and fight coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Habib Ahmed married by Omar Bakri Mohammad, founder of Al Muhajiroun, the UK's highest profile organisation supporting bin Laden ideology.

Finally, there are the links with a man at one time credited with being bin Laden's number three, Hamza Rabia.

The investigation itself included bugged conversations in Dubai, a luggage intercept at Amsterdam Schipol, and phone numbers written in invisible ink.

For a taster of the story, click here.

LONDON, England - For months on the campaign trail, the tough talk about Osama bin Laden never let him down. Repeatedly, President-elect Barack Obama said Bin Laden should be ‘chased out of the cave where he lives' and that Al Qaeda leaders need to be ‘snuffed out', killed or captured. And every time, there were cheers in the crowd. But those trite, simple statements now need to mean something in the "war on terror."

File image of Osama bin Laden from 1997.

As Obama embraced his new status as America's commander-in-chief, you could sense he knows there is little time to savour success. The extremists waging their war of terror are still on the hunt for their own victory.

U.S. General David Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command and the point man in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has a sobering assessment. "It is not possible to kill or capture your way out of an industrial-size insurgency," he told CNN earlier this week as he met officials in Pakistan.

Does that contradict the approach that Obama seems to want to take in combating terror? One thing is clear, no matter what strategy Obama adopts, the Bush administration has said that strategy must be devised and set in motion well before Obama is sworn in on January 20.

So it's no surprise in the closing days of the campaign, Obama was reading up on Afghanistan, picking up a book entitled ‘Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 ' by Steve Coll. The book's author told CNN his historical assessment has changed little in the last few years. Pakistan can no longer be a safe haven for Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

"I do think that it will be an important priority for the Obama presidency but I don't think you'll see him gun-slinging around the tribal areas of Pakistan simply trying to bring bin Laden to justice on his own." says Coll.

But what about that cave? Presumably the one in Pakistan where U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden  is still hiding. Pakistani officials told CNN this week the U.S. has it all wrong and they will try to convince Obama that bin Laden is not in Pakistan.

"Mr. Osama is not in our part of the world, had we known that he was in our part of the world, had there been any credible evidence for it we would have gone after him ourselves instead of waiting for the Americans to do it," says Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's High Commissioner to Britain.

And so the plot thickens, as it always has in trying to navigate a road to peace on either side of the Pakistan, Afghan border. It is a point not lost on Obama, even as domestic issues crowd his agenda.

"We have to snuff out Al Qaeda, we have to capture and/or kill bin Laden. And in order for us to do that, we're going to have to have cooperation from Afghans and Pakistanis. But, you know, it may get murky in terms of who are our potential allies, who are enemies in that situation," Obama told CNN's Wolf Blitzer last Friday.

There are clear signs President-elect Barack Obama is already tackling the frustrating complexity of the "war on terror" he will inherit, but that doesn't mean he will have any more success at winning it.

LONDON, ENGLAND–Those were the foreboding words of Wajid Shamsul Hasan hours before the Marriott hotel went up in flames.

Marriott Explosion

Hasan is Pakistan's High Commissioner here in London and while his words to me had nothing to do with the terror attack, his warning was prophetic.

Hasan's main concern before terrorists razed one of Islamabad's ‘Western' icons was American policy in Pakistan's tribal areas. The Pakistani government says it is furious at U.S. military incursions into the tribal regions saying it violates their sovereignty. More to the point Pakistani officials say, during these incursions the Americans have hit civilian targets, not Al Qaeda militants.

Which is what led Mr. Hasan to warn, "We're 160 million people in that part of the world that is already burning and volatile, all the region will be in flames if something goes haywire and these sort of policies continue so I'm sure our friends in America will listen to us."

But will American be listening? Even as President Asif Ali Zardari wings his way to Washington, American military and intelligence chiefs aren't necessarily looking at the Marriott attack as a game-changer. While there is considerable interest in who ordered this attack and how it was executed, the 'why' it happened is less material to American policy in Pakistan.

There was already word on Monday that a U.S. military helicopter may have made yet another incursion into Pakistan's tribal areas. The Pakistani President is hoping that the ‘I told you so' rant he delivers to President Bush will make him think twice about aggressively pursuing militants on Pakistani soil. In the words of Mr. Hasan, the Pakistani population can't take much more, enraged as it is over civilian deaths and American violations of their territorial integrity.

But in the same breath, the Pakistanis say they won't be intimidated by terrorists. They say they will continue pursuing militants in the Bajaur region, a notorious safe haven for terrorist training and activity. The Americans may be thinking to themselves the same thing the Pakistanis are saying in public: ‘We are not backing down'.

The problem with this American proposition is that there is the issue of a Pakistani border and the little ‘problem' of territorial integrity. More to the point, the Pakistani government claims American incursions have been largely ineffective, unless their intention is to cultivate still more resentment against the U.S. The fact is, while the Marriott attack will give a renewed sense of urgency to the Zardari meetings this week in the Oval Office, it will change little in the military planning offices across Washington.