Most people had never heard of Lashkar-e-Taiba before last week's Mumbai massacre, just as many had never heard of al-Qaida before the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania or before 9/11.

Now that Americans are among the dead, American media are reporting on the Pakistani Muslim group suspected of killing at least 172 in last week's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. But the group is well known to Indians after being suspected in numerous attacks, including the 2006 train bombings that killed 190 in Mumbai, then known as Bombay, as well as the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament in Kashmir.

And the group is well known to C. Christine Fair, a senior political analyst for the Rand Corp. and an Elmhurst High School graduate. Fair, who interned at the U.S. embassy in Mumbai in 1997 and remembers eating kebab at the Leopold Café where diners were mowed down by gunmen on Wednesday, said what was different about last week's attacks was who some of the targets were.

If it was Lashkar, which stands for “army of the pure,” Fair said it would be the first time they targeted Westerners such as the American rabbi and his wife who were murdered.

“They've always been incensed over Israeli occupation of Palestine, but they've never done anything to execute (their) anti-Semitic agenda,” said Fair, who has been collecting Lashkar propaganda for years. “This is really just a startling attack for so many reasons.”

Fair said the killings were typical of Lashkar's approach - kill as many people as possible rather than taking hostages. Initial media reports indicated that hostages were taken last week, but authorities now believe nearly all the victims were killed Wednesday and Thursday, according to The New York Times.

The group was formed around 1990 and is based in Kashmir, the territory disputed by Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan since the British partitioned the two countries after India's independence in 1947. In India, 80 percent of the approximately 1.1 billion population are Hindus, with about 13 percent Muslim.

The countries, which have at least 50 nuclear weapons each, came to the brink of war over Kashmir in 1998 and 2002. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani version of the CIA, has long been accused of supporting the Lashkar and the Taliban in Kashmir to harass the far larger Indian military there. Indians are accused of subjugating the Muslim population in Kashmir.

The Pakistani government has denied knowledge of the attacks, but Fair is skeptical. “The Pakistani government has not made a good-faith effort to crack down on them,” she said.

Pakistan has received some $13 billion in U.S. taxpayer money since 9/11, according to Fair, and she said the U.S. has a responsibility to make sure Americans aren't inadvertently funding terrorism. But she concedes it's a tall order.

“We've given them a lot of money to support the war on terrorism, and we haven't actually required them to shut down all of these militant groups operating in and from its territory,” Fair said. “That being said, it's very hard to do. How do you actually make Pakistan clamp down on militant groups operating in and from its borders? It's more easily said than done.”