A Pakistani government prosecutor said Monday he had been forced to delay his appeal against a court order which grants bail to the alleged mastermind of the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.

A judge in an Islamabad anti-terror court last week granted bail to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, accused over the siege on India's commercial capital that left 166 people dead and was blamed on the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

A Pakistani government prosecutor said Friday he will challenge a court order granting bail to the alleged mastermind of the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, which sparked strong condemnation from India.

Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi is accused of planning the 60-hour siege on India's commercial capital that left 166 people dead and was blamed on the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

Nearly 100 million Indians began voting in state elections Wednesday in the first major test of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's popularity since he stormed to power in May on a pledge to reform the economy.

Five months after Modi's rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a landslide national victory, voters are electing two regional assemblies -- in Haryana in the north and huge Maharashtra state in the west, of which Mumbai is the capital.

China's President Xi Jinping will make his first official visit to rival Asian giant India next week, officials said Tuesday, as expanding trade between the two remains overshadowed by territorial disputes.

Police have arrested three men over the suspected rape and murder of a teenager who had protested against village elders' harassment of her father in India's east, an officer said Wednesday.

The father of a student who died after being gang-raped on a moving bus in New Delhi spoke of his anger Friday after a senior minister referred to the infamous attack as a "small incident".

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said at a tourism conference on Thursday that "one small incident of rape in Delhi, advertised the world over, is enough to cost us millions of dollars in terms of lower tourism."

A roller-skating instructor was due in court Monday over the alleged rape of a six-year-old student which sparked protests from outraged parents, an official in the Indian city of Bangalore said.

The 30-year-old instructor at a top private school in Bangalore was arrested Sunday over the alleged assault on the premises earlier this month, the city's police commissioner said.

A Mumbai court convicted two teenage boys Tuesday over separate gang-rapes that shocked the city in a verdict that came days after an Indian minister said juvenile suspects should be treated as adults in rape cases.

Two 17-year-olds were found guilty -- one over the gang-rape of a photographer and another over the gang-rape of a telephone operator in the same abandoned mill compound in the city last year, public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam told Agence France Presse.

Rescuers searched desperately for survivors Sunday after an 11-story residential block collapsed in heavy rain in southern India, killing at least 11 people and possibly trapping dozens.

The accident late Saturday was India's second deadly building collapse in one day, after a dilapidated apartment block crumbled in the capital New Delhi, killing ten people including five children.

India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday to crack down on militant groups while stressing his desire for closer economic ties, the foreign ministry said.

Modi "underlined our concerns related to terrorism" to Sharif during landmark talks in New Delhi on the first day of his term in office, said Indian foreign secretary Sujatha Singh.