NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India on Friday welcomed Pakistan’s acknowledgement the Mumbai attacks were partly planned on its soil, in a sign of a possible thaw in relations between the two nuclear powers.

Pakistan said for the first time on Thursday that November’s attacks, in which 179 people died, had been launched and partly planned from Pakistan.

Its statement coincided with a visit to the region by U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke.

Analysts said it could signal Pakistan was responding to pressure from the United States under President Barack Obama, based on tying aid to progress made on battling militants.

“This is a positive step. We hope that the matter will be taken to its logical conclusion where the perpetrators are penalized,” Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told reporters.

However he also told parliament Pakistan’s reaction to the attacks had been characterized by “prevarication, denial, diversionary tactics and misplaced sense of victimhood” and said it must dismantle all militant infrastructure on its soil.

“I do not discount in any way either their intent or their sincerity, but the fact remains that the overwhelming response of official Pakistan to the Mumbai attack was not appropriate to a terrorist attack where innocents were massacred in cold blood.”

Pakistan said Mukherjee’s statement ran counter to a serious approach needed to uncover all the facts. It expected “India to come clean on the multiple facets of the Mumbai tragedy,” a foreign ministry statement said.

Analysts said Pakistan’s announcement had assuaged much of India’s frustration and there could now be several months of toing and froing between the two countries over the probe.

“Is this the beginning of the mea culpa within the Pakistan establishment about terrorist acts being directed against India?” said strategic analyst Uday Bhaskar.

ELECTION

A waning of tensions could help India’s ruling Congress party ahead of a parliamentary election due by May, but analysts saw little real progress until a new government is elected.

“If Pakistan is going to make a gesture to India, they will make it with a new Indian government rather than a government with only a few months left in office,” political columnist Amitabh Mattoo told Reuters.

India’s Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said Pakistan had emerged from denial mode.

“With this revelation, now the next stage should be eliminating the terrorist camps inside Pakistan and crushing the association between state actors and these terrorist groups,” BJP spokesman Rajiv Pratap Rudy said.

Indian newspapers welcomed Islamabad’s statement.

“Pak blinks, finally,” read the headline in the Times of India newspaper, while the Mail Today led a story with “Finally, Pakistan admits some guilt.”

Rehman Malik, Pakistan's adviser to the prime minister on the interior, gestures during a news conference at the interior ministry in Islamabad February 12, 2009. Pakistan was holding in custody the ringleader and five other suspects in the conspiracy behind a militant attack that killed 179 people in Mumbai, Rehman said on Thursday. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood

Pakistani officials have given details of how 10 gunmen had sailed from Karachi to carry out the attack in the Indian financial capital between November 26-29. It said it was holding in custody a ringleader and five other suspects.

India has always maintained the plot was hatched in Pakistan, and blamed elements in Pakistani intelligence agencies, which had earlier built up militant groups to fight Indian rule in Kashmir.

Mukherjee said Pakistan had to decide how it wanted to handle relations with India.

“We are at a point in our relationship where the authorities in Pakistan itself have to choose the kind of relationship that they want with India in the future,” Mukherjee said.

“Much depends on actions in the Mumbai case reaching their logical conclusion.”