Q+A: Who was to blame for Indian intelligence failure?

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Three days before Islamist militants landed in Mumbai to launch deadly attacks, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had warned the country's police chiefs India could not afford another attack.

"I only wish to emphasize here that time is not on our side," he said prophetically, bemoaning the inability of the police and intelligence agencies to obtain "pinpointed and actionable intelligence" in time to prevent this kind of attack.

Just the day before that, Home Minister Shivraj Patil, who has since resigned, warned the same gathering that India's coastline needed to be guarded better.

With India's police, coast guard and intelligence communities pointing fingers over whether information existed that should have been acted on, here are a series of questions and answers about the apparent intelligence failures before the attacks.

* Were intelligence agencies to blame?

India had suffered a series of bombings on its cities even before the Mumbai attacks, and since 2004 has trailed only behind Iraq in terms of lives lost to attacks by militants.

Just as U.S. intelligence agencies are often criticized for failing to recruit enough Arabic speakers, India's Hindu-dominated security apparatus has come under fire for failing to enlist enough Muslims or to penetrate the networks of Islamist militants.

Were warnings issued?

* Intelligence sources told the NDTV news channel they had issued a series of warnings of a possible attack on Mumbai by sea in the months leading up to last week's strike.

The latest, warning that the "sea wing" of Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (L-e-T) was planning an attack, was issued on November 18, just eight days before the militants struck, the TV channel said.

An earlier report warned that the Gateway of India monument and the Oberoi-Trident hotel were among the possible targets.

* But were those reports specific enough?

A senior police officer told Reuters the intelligence was were not specific enough to be actionable, especially along such a vast coastline as India's.

A top coast guard official, though, did confirm they had received an intelligence report shortly before the attacks.

"Yes, the coast guard and navy did have intelligence inputs that an L-e-T boat was to land in the creeks off the northwest Gujarat coast," he told Reuters, referring to the western state which borders Pakistan and lies to the north of Mumbai.

* Were the fishermen's warnings ignored?