Islamabad/Karachi: A Pakistani newspaper has reported that its correspondents have tracked down the family of the surviving gunman, who assailed India's commercial capital, Mumbai, last month leaving 173 dead.

Dawn, an English-language daily quoted Amir Kasab as saying he was the father of Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the 21-year-old suspect now held in India. Interviewed in his village of Faridkot, Amir Kasab said his son had disappeared around four years ago.

"I was in denial for the first couple of days, saying to myself it could not have been my son," the newspaper quoted him as saying. "Now I have accepted it."

Last week, a BBC correspondent located a house in Faridkot in Punjab, the inhabitants of which carried the surname Kasab, but the residents denied any link with either Ajmal or with any Amir Kasab, the name of Ajmal's father as reported by media.

"For the next few minutes, the fifty-something man of medium build agonised over the reality that took time sinking in, amid sobs complaining about the raw deal the fate had given him and his family," Dawn said in a special report yesterday titled "Revealing the Faridkot-Mumbai link".

"Now I have accepted it. This is the truth. I have seen the picture in the newspaper. This is my son Ajmal," he was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

Police custody

Variously addressed as Azam, Kamal and Kasab, the young man, apparently in his 20s, is being kept in police custody in Mumbai.

According to previous media reports quoted by Dawn, Ajmal left home a frustrated teenager about four years ago and went to Lahore. After his brush with crime and criminals in Lahore, he is said to have joined a religious group during a visit to Rawalpindi.

Along with others, he was reportedly trained in fighting. And after a crash course in navigation, said Amir Kasab, a father of three sons and two daughters, Ajmal disappeared from home four years ago.

"He had asked me for new clothes on Eid that I couldn't provide him. He got angry and left," Amir told Dawn. "While Amir was talking, Ajmal's two 'sisters and a younger brother' were lurking about. To Amir's right, on a nearby charpoy [cot], sat their mother, wrapped in a chador and in a world of her own," the Dawn report said, describing the scene and the tense atmosphere.

"Her trance was broken as the small picture of Ajmal lying in a Mumbai hospital was shown around. They appeared to have identified their son. The mother shrunk back but the father said he had no problem in talking about the subject," the report added.