New Delhi, July 26 - Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab was captured in a chilling photograph and now he has confessed his role in the Mumbai terrorist attacks, but he remains a 'gunman', rather than a 'terrorist', for the New York Times and other leading American newspapers. And with a reason.

After his surprising and dramatic confession before a special court in Mumbai Monday, Kasab is hogging headlines in the American media that is revisiting the semantic-ethical issue of which attacker qualifies as terrorist.

For the New York Times and the Washington Post, Kasab is strictly a gunman.

'Mumbai Gunman Enters Plea Of Guilty', the Post headline read a day later, and the 428 words of the report from New Delhi do not include 'terrorist' -- not even to qualify the 'attack'.

Kasab is 'one of the 10 gunmen who laid siege to India's financial capital for three days last November', Lashkar-e-Taiba is 'outlawed, Pakistan-based group' and the attack that claimed more than 170 lives is 'the deadly carnage'.

The NYT report with the headline 'Suspect Stirs Mumbai Court by Confessing' has 1,050 words, but terrorist is not among them. Kasab is 'suspect', 'gunman' and 'attacker'.

The Wall Street Journal calls the incidents 'terrorist attacks', but those behind them were '10 suspected gunmen'. For the Los Angeles Times, the 21-year-old Pakistani is 'the only suspected gunman'.

This is, of course, no different from the terminology the American media used in reporting those ghastly events on Nov 26-29 last year.

Why is, so to say, one man's 'terrorist' another man's 'assailant'?

The answer was given by the NYT's public editor Clark Hoyt.

Writing in December when those gory images were still fresh in memory, Hoyt noted that the '10 young men' who 'went on a rampage with machine guns and grenades, taking hostages, setting fires and murdering men, women and children' were described in The Times by many labels.

'They were 'militants', 'gunmen', 'attackers' and 'assailants'.