(RTTNews) - Expressing solidarity with India on the eve of the first anniversary of the Mumbai attacks, Israel said its growing bilateral trade and tourism ties with it proved that terrorism did not either defeat or deter either country.

Candles were lit at the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue in south Mumbai for the 183 persons who were killed in last year's militant attacks in Indian financial capital, with calls for unity to fight and defeat extremism around the world.

Israel's ambassador to India, Mark Sofer, told the gathering: "There must never be, and indeed never is, any justification for the massacre of the kind that we witnessed here in Mumbai."

Reiterating Israel's full faith in the Indian security forces and the government, he said those who thought that killing Jews on Indian soil would undermine relations between India and Israel were mistaken.

"The state of Israel does not forget and we will ensure that nothing like this happens again," he said.

The Israeli Embassy in New Delhi said in a statement Wednesday that bilateral trade steadily increased from $200 million in 1992 to $4 billion in 2008, and tourism also was growing, with about 35,000 Israelis touring India annually and almost 20,000 Indians visiting Israel in 2007.
Israel overtook Russia as India's leading arms supplier this year. The two countries signed weapons contracts worth more than $1 billion in 2007 and 2008.

"India has increasingly turned to Israel for sophisticated weapons systems. The Mumbai terror attack in November 2008 was particularly significant in expediting India's acquisition of air and naval surveillance systems which they bought from Israel," the statement said.

Following the terror attack, India purchased a $600-million aerostat radar system and deployed along its border with Pakistan, the statement said. The two countries began a joint development project for a medium-range air defense system.

More than 300 others were injured in the attacks, which saw 10 well-armed Pakistani Islamist gunmen of that country's Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist group storming several targets in India's financial capital November 26, last year, holding the city to ransom for three days before all but one of them were shot by commandos of India's elite National Security Group (NSG) and the Mumbai police.

At the Nariman House or Chabad Centre, a Jewish cultural and religious center owned by the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the Pakistani terrorists killed six Jews, including the center's director Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his pregnant wife, Rivka. The couple's then two-year-old son, Moshe, was rescued to safety by his Indian nanny.

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