The Road to Maximum Terror

"The only language India understands", theLashkar-e-Taiba’s (LeT) supreme amir (chief) told top functionaries of hisorganisation on October 19, 2008, "is that of force, and that is thelanguage in which it must be talked to".

Less than six weeks later, around 9:00 pm on the night of November 26, awoman in the koliwada — or fishing village — off south Mumbai’s upmarketBudhwar Park area saw an inflatable dinghy nudge up against the beach. She, anda few fishermen who were drinking near the beach, watched as ten men got off theboat, and made their way towards the road behind the slum. "Don’t botherus", growled one of the men, in response to a friendly query. Thevillagers, wisely, kept their peace.

Much of what we know about what happened next comes from the testimony of thedark young man who, dressed in a knock-off Versace T-shirt and grey cargo pants,was caught on closed-circuit camera just minutes before he opened fire atcommuters at Mumbai’s crowded Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) railwaystation.

Mohammad Ajmal Amir has told the Mumbai Police he was part of group of tenmen who spent months training in guerrilla warfare, marine commando techniquesand navigation skills at Lashkar camps in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) andPunjab.

Lashkar military commander Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, Amir has toldinvestigators, showed the group Google Earth maps of South Mumbai, and films ofthe targets each of the five two-man units had been tasked to hit. Iman, alongwith his partner ‘Abu Umar’ — whose name, he learned, was in fact MohammadIsmail Khan — were tasked with attacking the CST. Once they had reached theirdestinations, the men were told to kill, take hostages, and then — holed outon the roofs of their targets — phone Indian television stations. Once theinevitable rescue operation began, the men were to slaughter the hostages.

Amir’s journey to Mumbai began on September 15, 2008, when the five groupsof fidayeen (suicide squad) were ordered to travel to Karachi after leavingMuridke, home of the Lashkar’s parent-political group, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD).The group reassembled near Karachi, where the fidayeen were told that they wouldleave for Mumbai on September 27. For reasons that are unclear, the departurewas delayed and fresh orders did not come in until November 22.

Lakhvi, Amir has said, personally saw off the group when it finally pushedoff the Karachi coast at 4:00 AM on November 23. Amir and Khan rowed out to thePakistan-flagged merchant ship al Hussaini along with men they knew as AbuAkasha and Abu Umar; ‘Bada’ [‘elder’ or ‘big’] Abdul Rehman and AbuAli; ‘Chhota’ [‘younger’ or ‘small’] Abdul Rehman and Fahadullah;Shoaib and Umar — all Pakistani nationals who spoke Punjabi.

Each man carried a Kalashnikov rifle, 200 rounds of ammunition and grenades.Five men had larger bags, packed with integrated circuit-controlled improvisedexplosive devices. The group also had at least one state-of-the art GarminGlobal Positioning System set, and several mobile phones fitted with Indian SIMcards.

Near Indian coastal waters, the men hijacked a fishing boat, theGujarat-registered Kuber, which had strayed away from the main fishing fleet inbad weather. Four of the five-man crew on the Kuber were taken aboard the alHusaini, where they are believed to have been executed. The fifth crew member,Amar Narayan Singh — a 45 year old father of three — guided the fidayeenunit to the Sassoon Docks in Mumbai. Once there, the men slit Singh’s throat,and reached Budhwar Park in their inflatable dinghy.

From Budhwar Park, the men travelled on to their targets by the simplestmeans possible: they hailed taxis or, in three cases, simply walked the fewhundred metres to their targets, all clustered in south Mumbai. Bombs later wentoff in two taxis in Mumbai’s suburbs, which are thought to have been plantedthere by two of the teams. Once at their targets, the men began opening fire.The operation went almost precisely as planned, bar two factors: againstimpossible odds, a few ill-equipped Mumbai Police officers put up an unexpectedfighting, derailing the hostage-taking plans — and Amir, when halted by onepolice team, took two bullets in his arm, and lived.

Amir’s account — disputed by Pakistan’s Stateapparatus and media, until a welter of western reports confirmed that theterrorist was indeed a resident of the village of Faridkot, in Pakistan’sOkara District — isn’t however the sole piece of evidence on the Mumbaimassacre’s planning and authorship.

Evidence on the route used by the fidayeen to reach Mumbai has been recordedin detail on the GPS system used by the terrorists, which maps their journeyfrom Karachi in minute detail. In addition, a satellite phone used by theterrorists to make calls from the Kuber has five Pakistani numbers in its callrecords. 

US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) detectives have also determined thatthe IEDs used in Mumbai closely resemble, in their fabrication, devices used byPakistan-linked terrorist groups operating in Pakistan. 

Moreover, the Mumbai Police and India’s intelligence services were able tointercept several phone calls made by the terrorists from their mobile phones,during the attack, to their controllers in Pakistan. The calls were made tovirtual phone numbers in New Jersey and Vienna, purchased from thevoice-over-internet service provider Vox Phone, paid for through a Western Unionbranch in Karachi.

The intelligence harvest also appears to bear out Amir’s account. The USCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA), notably, delivered two warnings to India ofpossible attack on Mumbai. The first, couched in general terms, was delivered toIndia through the Research and Analysis Wing on September 18. In response to anIndian request, the CIA delivered further details on September 24, warningexpressly that the Lashkar was planning to hit targets with large numbers offoreigners, including the Taj Mahal Hotel. Read against Amir’s testimony tothe Mumbai Police, it would appear that the CIA had picked up the movement ofthe Lashkar fidayeen from Muridke to Karachi.

The CIA’s warnings corroborated information generated by India’sIntelligence Bureau (IB), which, in September, warned that the Lashkar hadconducted reconnaissance operations in several parts of Mumbai, in particulararound hotels in south Mumbai as well as the suburbs. The IB’s warnings hadled the Mumbai Police to step up security around south Mumbai. Pamphlets weredistributed to store owners, asking them to report suspicious movement. Topmanagement at the Taj Mahal Hotel and Oberoi Hotel were also briefed on thethreat. 

Bar imposing parking restrictions for a brief period, neither hotel acted.The chronically understaffed Mumbai Police, too, was forced to move out theadditional police force deployed around the hotels in October, to deal withpersistent law-and-order problems related to a local ethnic-chauvinistmobilisation. In any case, it is unclear that the additional Police presence inMumbai would have altered the course of events: some officers had not trainedwith firearms for a decade, and even the elite Anti-Terrorism Squad’s QuickReaction Teams had not used their assault rifles for a year, because of anammunition shortage.

On November 18, RAW itself intercepted a satellite phone conversation fromthe al Husaini, which suggested that an unspecified ‘consignment’ was on itsway to Mumbai. RAW analysts, who determined that the satellite phone call wasmade to a number known to be used by Lakhvi and his subordinates, notified theIndian Coast Guard of a potential threat.

Late on the night of November 20, coast Guard authorities, in turn, launched a day-long hunt for the al-Hussaini,based on the GPS coordinates provided by RAW. The search, however, provedunsuccessful — not surprisingly, since from Amir’s testimony, we learn thatthe Lashkar group was yet to board the al Husaini. Coast Guard patrols kept aneye out for the ship in coming days, but not the Indian fishing boat on whichthe terrorists were eventually to arrive.

Without full cooperation from Pakistani investigators, though, it is unclearhow much of the technical evidence can be turned into material that willfacilitate the criminal prosecution of the command-level perpetrators. 

From the available evidence, however, it is clear that the Lashkar had longbeen planning attacks using sea routes across the Indian Ocean. From as early as2002, Indian intelligence assets reported that Lashkar elements were receivingsome basic marine-skills training at the Mangla Dam reservoir inPakistan-occupied Kashmir, and at the organisation’s private lake in Murikde.

American journalist Steve Coll provided independent corroboration for thesereports in a recent article, noting that it "has long been an open secret,and a source of some hilarity among foreign correspondents, that under the guiseof ‘humanitarian relief operations’, Lashkar practiced amphibious operationson a lake at its vast headquarters campus, outside Lahore".

Faisal Haroun, a top Lashkar operative who commandedthe terror group’s India-focussed operations out of Bangladesh, helpedconcentrate India’s intelligence concerns on the issue sharply. In September2006, Haroun was briefly held by Bangladesh authorities before being quietlydeported. But a west European covert service obtained transcripts of hisquestioning by Bangladesh’s Directorate-General of Field Intelligence. Haroun,it turned out, had been using a complex shipping network, using merchant shipsand small fishing boats, to move explosives to Lashkar units operating in India.Among the end-users of these supplies was Ghulam Yazdani, a Hyderabad residentwho commanded a series of attacks, including the assassination of Gujaratpogrom-complicit former Home Minister, Haren Pandya and the June 2005 bombing ofthe Delhi-Patna Shramjeevi Express. Investigators probing the Haroun storydetermined his network had helped land a giant consignment of explosives andassault rifles on the Maharashtra coast for an abortive 2006 Lashkar-led attemptto bomb Gujarat.

India’s intelligence services determined that Haroun had been attempting toset up an Indian Ocean base for the Lashkar. Along with a Male-based Maldivesresident, Ali Assham, Haroun had studied the prospect of using a deserted IndianOcean island for building a Lashkar storehouse, from where weapons andexplosives could be moved to Kerala and then on to the rest of India. In 2007,when evidence emerged of heightened Islamist activity in the Maldives —including the bombing of tourists in Male’s Sultan Park, and the setting up ofa Sharia-run mini-state on the Island of Himandhoo — the seriousness of thethreat to India’s western seaboard became even more evident.

Former Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil was shaken up enough by the flow ofinformation to make a special reference, in a 2006 speech, to the emergingmaritime terror threat. Patil’s Ministry moved, its Annual Report for2007-2008 records, to strengthen "coastal security arrangements [and], tocheck infiltration". In liaison with the nine coastal States and UnionTerritories, the Report discloses, funds had been earmarked to set up "73Coastal Police Stations which will be equipped with 204 boats, 153 jeeps and 312motor cycles for mobility on coast and in close coastal waters. The CoastalPolice Stations will also have a Marine Police with personnel trained inmaritime activities". While about two-thirds of these Police Stations have,indeed, been built, there is no Marine Police in place, since there are nolocations of facilities for their training.

Meanwhile, the Lashkar was closing in. India firstlearned of the Lashkar’s efforts to use the Mumbai-Karachi sea route in 2007,when the IB successfully penetrated a plot to land eight Lashkar fidayeen.Travelling in a boat investigators believe was hired through the Dawood IbrahimKaskar organised crime syndicate, captained by a man who spoke Mumbai-accentedHindi, the eight fidayeen landed off the Mumbai coast on March 3, 2007. 

Later, the group spent time at a safehouse provided by a Mumbai-based Lashkaroperative in the city’s suburbs, before travelling by train to join Lashkarunits operating in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). Two of the fidayeen, Pakistaninationals Jamil Ahmad Awan and Abdul Majid Araiyan, were arrested and are nowheld at the Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu; the rest are believed to have been killedin follow-up counter-terrorism raids.

In February 2008, the IB hit on yet more evidence that Mumbai was beingprepared for assault. Investigators probing a New Year’s Eve attack on aCentral Reserve Police Force camp in Rampur found that the Lashkar unitresponsible for the attack also had plans to hit the Mumbai stock exchange andthe Taj Mahal Hotel. Uttar Pradesh resident Fahim Ahmed Ansari, who wasrecruited by the Lashkar while working in Dubai in 2005, and then trained at itscamps in Pakistan, was arrested along with Pakistani fidayeen, Imran Shehzadfrom Bhimber in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Mohammad Farooq Bhatti fromGujranwala in Punjab. Ansari provided investigators with a graphic account ofhis training, as well as the abortive plans to stage a fidayeen attack in Mumbai.

All three men carried legitimate Pakistani passports, presumably intended tosecure their escape through Nepal. Shehzad held passport number EK5149331,issued on March 14, 2007, while Bhatti used passport number AW3177021, issued aday earlier. Ansari’s Pakistani passport, BM 6809341, issued on November 1,2007, bears the pseudonym Hammad Hassan.

Saeed and other top Lashkar functionaries have also become increasinglyaggressive in their recent public proclamations. In his October 19, 2008,speech, which was delivered before an audience of key Lashkar leaders likeMaulana Amir Hamza, Qari Muhammad Yaqoob Sheikh and Muhammad Yahya Mujahid atthe organisation’s headquarters in Muridke, the Lashkar chief made clear hesaw India as an existential threat. India, he claimed, was building dams inJ&K to choke Pakistan’s water supplies and cripple its agriculture.Earlier, in an October 6 speech, Saeed claimed India had "made a deal withthe United States to send 150,000 Indian troop to Afghanistan". He claimedIndia had agreed to support the US in an existential war against Islam. Finally,in a sermon to a religious congregation at the Jamia Masjid al-Qudsia in Lahoreat the end of October, Saeed proclaimed that there was an "ongoing war inthe world between Islam and its enemies" and that "crusaders of theeast and west have united in a cohesive onslaught against Muslims".

It takes little to see that Saeed’s pronouncements were, in fact, a manifestofor Mumbai’s night of maximum terror.

Where might things go from here? For one, it is clear thatfurther progress in the investigation will, in no small part, be contingent onsupport from the Pakistani State. While the mass of electronic evidence, as wellas Amir’s testimony, point unequivocally to the fact that the authors of theattack were in Karachi and Lahore, demonstrating who they were — and provingtheir identities in a court of law — will need investigation on Pakistanisoil.

Pakistan, as things stand, appears to have little incentive to back such anenterprise. For one, a full investigation of the Mumbai massacre will lead,without dispute, to embarrassing revelations on the Inter-Services Intelligence(ISI) Directorate’s relationship with the Lashkar — a relationship ablydocumented not just by scholars like Hassan Abbas, but by Islamabad’s envoy toWashington D.C., Husain Haqqani. More important, mired as it is in multipleconfrontations with jihadis in the North West Frontier Province andFederally-Administered Tribal Areas, the Pakistani state cannot but wish toavert another conflict – this time, in the country’s heartland Punjabprovince. 

Given its enormous financial resources and a wide popular reach that extendsinto the ranks of the Armed Forces, the JuD is arguably the best-organisedpolitical force in Punjab. Dismantling its infrastructure will prove aformidable challenge to Pakistan, even if the State does, indeed, decide itwishes to take that course.

Failure to compel Pakistan to act, however, could have incalculableconsequences. If the "crusaders of the east" were the Lashkar’s maintarget till now, the Mumbai massacre demonstrates their western counterparts areno longer guaranteed immunity from its guns. The Pakistan State itself will comeunder increasing threat from a group that will, without doubt, be emboldened byits ability to survive the fallout from Mumbai. India and the world will have toact — or confront immeasurably larger horrors in the only-too-foreseeablefuture.

Praveen Swami is Associate Editor, The Hindu. Courtesey, the SouthAsia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal