The incident also suggested a growing role for militants with links to hard-line Muslim groups that developed during the guerrilla war in Afghanistan. Indian officials said that Al Hadid, the militant group that delivered kidnap notes to the offices of the BBC and the Voice of America in New Delhi on Monday, appeared to draw its members from Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The group was not previously known to have been active in Kashmir, the officials said.

The police acknowledged that the breakthrough on Monday came by chance, when policemen conducting a routine robbery investigation in a village outside Ghaziabad, 25 miles east of New Delhi, stumbled across the house where Mr. Nuss, who is from Walnut Creek, Calif., had been held.

Questioning of two Muslim men arrested in the Monday incident led the police to the second hideout, at a village outside Saharanpur, 90 miles north of New Delhi. After being flown to New Delhi in an Indian Air Force plane, the three Britons, Paul Ridout, Christopher Cranston and Rhys Partridge, all in their late 20's, said that they, like Mr. Nuss, had been shackled throughout their captivity. "We were chained to the floor like animals," Mr. Partridge said.

Diplomats from Britain and the United States said they would be asking the Indian authorities why they were not told of the kidnappings before the kidnappers delivered notes to the two news organizations on Monday. A senior official of India's Home Ministry, Kantipudi Padmanabhaiah, said at a news conference after the tourists were freed that the Indian police had known of the kidnappings since Friday, eight days after the four men disappeared.

The diplomats speculated that the kidnappers seized the foreigners as part of a wider effort to draw Britain and the United States into the Kashmir conflict on the militants' side. Although both governments have been critical of what they have described as human rights abuses by both sides in the Kashmir struggle, they have sought not to become embroiled in a conflict that has origins in the partition of India in 1947, when Pakistan and India dispatched troops to Kashmir in the first of two wars they have fought over the territory.