Now that the Mumbai Terror act is over and the finger pointing/attempts to connect Pakistan to it, I found a series of articles that would make anyone wonder if the Indian government, police, media or the sole terrorist they have caught have any idea what the plan was or how it was executed.

Let’s start from India Times, who states that “the gang of terrorists who wreaked mayhem in Mumbai for three days were made to believe by their Lashkar bosses that they were not being sent on a suicide mission and that they would be coming back.”

The India Times reports the name of the jihadi as Ajmal Amir Kasab, who identified his partners in crime as:

Abu Ali, Fahad, Omar, Shoaib, Umer, Abu Akasha, Ismail, Abdul Rahman (Bara) and Abdul Rahman (Chhota)

The account of the plan is as follows:

• All the terrorists were trained in marine warfare along with a special course Daura-e-Shifa conducted by Lashkar-e-Taiba that transforms routine terror strikes into specialized raids by commandos.
• Group set off on November 21 from an isolated creek near Karachi without the deadly cargo of arms and ammunition.
• Group received arms and ammunitiion on board a large Pakistani vessel which picked them up the following day. The vessel, whose ownership is now the subject of an international probe, had four Pakistanis apart from the crew.
• A day later they came across an Indian-owned trawler, Kuber, which was commandeered on the seas. 4 of the fishermen were killed, but its skipper, Amarkit Singh, was forced to proceed towards India. Amarkit was killed the next day, and Ismail took the wheel
• Ismail, a trained sailor, used the GPS to reach Mumbai coast on Nov. 26.
• Group shifted to inflatable boats, 10 nautical miles from Mumbai, before disembarking at Badhwar Park in Cuffe Parade.
• From there, they mandated to kill indiscriminately, particularly white foreign tourists, and spare Muslims split up into five batches. 2 (Ismail & Ajmal) took a taxi to Victoria Terminus. 3 other batches of 2 each headed for Overoi Hotel, Cafe Leopold and Nariman House. The remaining 4 went to Taj Hotel.

And what I thought was an interestingly drafted line of text:

Incidentally, Kasab and Ismail were the two who gunned down ATS chief Hemant Karkare, additional CP Ashok Kamthe and encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar.

In another story on the India Times website, the captured terrorist’s name is Azam Amir Kasab. But in this story, the motivation has changed:

Kasab has told police that they were sent with a specific mission of targeting Israelis to avenge atrocities on Palestinians. This was why they targetted Nariman House, a complex meant for Israelis.

And then the involvement of ISI:

Crime branch has also recovered several fake identity and credit cards from the belongings of dead terrorists. “All the cards are in different names and of different banks. Now we are at least trying to figure out how they procured credit cards from various banks.” said Maria. The recovery of so many cards with different names have led Mumbai police to suspect the involvement of ISI.

And, in the number of attackers:

Though Maria maintained only 10 terrorists had sneaked in, the two blasts in taxis in Wadi Bunder and Vile Parle have led the police to believe there could be possibility of the presence of another two or more terrorists in the city.

In a seperate India Times story, quoting Times Now sources that the “terrorist who was caught alive had confessed to investigating agencies that they had a plan to blow up the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai.” and that the terrorists had enough explosives to do it.

The same story claims that “they also believed to have told about their plan to replicate a JW Marriott (Islamabad) to the Mumbai hotel.

The terrorist’s name: Azam Amir Kasav.

In this version, the plan was:

• The chief planner of the Mumbai terror plot had come to the city a month ago, took picture and filmed strategic locations and trained their group and instructed them to “kill till the last breath.”
• Every man was given six to seven magazines with fifty bullets each, eight hand grenades per terrorist with one AK-57, an automatic loading revolver and a supply of dry fruits.
• Azam reportedly disclosed that the group left Karachi in one boat and upon reaching Gujarat they hoisted a white flag on their boat and were intercepted by two officers of the coast guard near Porbandar and while they were being questioned one of the terrorists grappled with one of the officers slit his throat and threw the body in the boat. The other officer was told to help the group reach Mumbai. 
• When they were four nautical miles away from Mumbai there were three speedboats waiting for them where the other coastguard officer was killed. All the ammo was then shifted into these three spedboats they reached Colaba jetty on Wednesday night and the ten men broke up into groups of two each. 
• Four of these men went to the Taj Mahal hotel, two of them to the Trident hotel, two towards Nariman House at Colaba and two of which Azam was one moved to CST

In another Times of India story, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister R R Patil on Saturday claimed that the terrorist, Mohammad Aslam Kasam, was found with heavy ammunititions and they had a plan to kill 5,000 people.

• Police found a large quantity of hand grenades, bombs and hundreds of rounds with the terrorists, he said.
• Two boxes containing eight kg RDX each were found near the Taj hotel which was cleared of terrorists today, he said adding “it has been sent to forensic labs for confirmation”.
• Asked about the reports that terrorists were working in the city from the past few months, Patil said “they were not staying here. They came in the city on the day of the attack”.
• “They were having maps of the hotels but got directions over phone from another country,” Patil said, refusing to name of the country.
• Patil also denied involvement of any locals in the attacks or locals helping terrorists.
• About the reports that terrorists were carrying credit cards, Patil said the investigation is on. He refuted reports that the terrorists were talking in Marathi.

Then to top it all off, IBN, the CNN affiliate in India reports:

• A group of 12 men travelled from Karachi on a vessel suspected to be owned by gangster Dawood Ibrahim to attack Mumbai, the only suspect arrested for the terrorist strike on India’s commercial capital has said. Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amir Kasar, 21, hails from Faridkot city in Pakistan. He was captured at the Girgaum Chowpatty Naka in Mumbai while he was trying to escape in a car he had snatched from its owner.
• All terrorists were trained in two camps for three months. To navigate through Mumbai, they had GPS direction finders and Google earth maps on CDs.
• Security officials suspect the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, and Dawood’s crime network supported the terrorists.
• Intelligence agencies have informed the government that the material found on the trawler Kuber proves Pakistan’s link to the terror attack. The trawler was recovered 5 km away from Mumbai’s coastline after being spotted by naval air surveillance. There was a satellite phone was on board and the logs show calls were made to Jalalabad in Afghanistan and locations in Pakistan.
• Intelligence agencies reckon the terrorists hijacked Kuber mid-sea after they got off a merchant vessel, likely to be owned by Dawood, from Karachi.
• The terrorists killed the most of the crew on board the Kuber and threw their bodies into the sea. The trawler’s skipper, Amarsinh Solanki, and one crew member were then asked navigate the trawler towards the Mumbai coast.
• The terrorists killed the crewmember after a while and threw him overboard. Five nautical miles short of the Mumbai coast, Solanki was killed. The terrorists got into two dinghies and rowed to a place in Cuffe Parade.

The Update on Sunday from the India Times gives us a new wrinkle to the story:

In the fresh leads from the Mumbai terror attack investigation, Intelligence sources say they intercepted conversation between Muzammil, Muzaffarabad chief of LeT operations, and a certain Yahya in Bangladesh. 

Yahya arranged SIM cards, fake ID-cards primarily from western countries like Mauritius, UK, US, Australia. A Mauritian identity card was found on one of the terrorists shot down.

The satellite phone found on the MV Kuber also has shown that calls were made to Jalalabad. These calls were traced to Zakir Ur Rehman, a chief of training of the LeT. 

Intelligence sources have also revealed that in the second week of July, intelligence officials knew about 25 terrorists training in the Pakistan village of Durbari Mitho, and that an ISI agent was also involved in the training.

By the way, if you search for Faridkot (the home of the terrorist) with Google, you will find it is in India, whereas this new village of Durbari Mitho doesn’t exist. And Jalalabad is in Afghanistan, not Pakistan.

Monday’s Update from the India Times changes the entire story of training and attack:

“There were 24 of us who took one-year training in camps organised by Laskar-e-Taiba (LeT) at Mansera and Muzzarafabad in Punjab province of Pakistan. Ten of us were later handpicked for the Mumbai operation,” said Ajmal Amir Kasab during interrogations.

According to sources, Kasab, 21, the only terrorist arrested by the Mumbai police, told his interrogators that Abdul Rahman, an ex-soldier popularly called Chacha, had given them training.

Scroll back up to the top of this post, there was an Abdul Rahman (Chotta) that was included in the attackers list originally provided by the terrorist. Could it be the same person?

The sources said Kasab explained that the training was divided into seven phases. “He said the first phase was of ‘very hard physical training’ of three months which included running 10 to 15 km. The next three months were for marine training like swimming, surfing, diving and boating in high seas. The rest included arms and ammunition training,” said a source.

Again, scroll up a little bit and you will see that an India Times story just a few days ago reported that “police sources” had confirmed that the terrorist confessed that they had trained at 2 different camps for a period of 3 months. According to the new account, the first 2 phases were 6 months, with no indication of how long the other phases lasted.

After the training was over, they were sent to Mumbai for a “short internship”, Kasab is believed to have told the cops. This was the period when the accused did the reccee of the city and even went to the five star hotels (Taj and Oberoi), the sources said.

Sources said the Mumbai operation plot was planned in Karachi some six months ago. Joint commissioner of police (crime) Rakesh Maria said,”We are closely working with the all the central agencies who have earlier handled such situations.”

In a fresh development in the investigations, the Mumbai police called up their Gujarat counterparts to enquire about whether the terrorists used Amar Narayan, the skipper of the fishing trawler used by them, as a mole. Narayan was detained by Pakistan for three months for illegally entering into the Pak waters.

Police are now taking the help of top technical experts to break into the details of the GPS system and the satellite phone which they recovered from a terrorist at the Taj hotel. This GPS helped them to navigate the sea route from Karachi to Mumbai via Porbander, cops said.

The police have launched a manhunt for the few locals who have given the terrorists logistic support in the operation.

From the New York Times, additional information:

Reuters quoted a senior police official as saying Sunday that the sole gunman captured alive had told the police he was a member of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and elsewhere.

The government has not allowed outside access to the captive, who is said to have identified himself as Ajmal Amir Qasab, a Pakistani citizen who was wounded in the leg and was being treated at a military hospital.

An officer of the Anti-Terror Squad branch in Mumbai, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said the man had given inconsistent answers to questioning, sometimes saying there were 10 attackers, sometimes more than 10. The officer also said that Anti-Terror Squad investigators believed there were accomplices who may have left weapons at the hotels for the gunmen, and that names and telephone numbers of five Mumbai residents were found among the cellphones and wallets of the attackers.

He also confirmed reports in the Indian press that a satellite phone used by the attackers had been used to call a phone number in the Pakistani city of Karachi during the assault. The officer also disputed Indian press assertions that the attackers were Pakistani, saying they were of many nationalities.

The chairman of the Tata Group, the conglomerate that owns the Taj hotel, asserted that it had been warned about the possibility of a terrorist attack and had taken some measures, but that the assailants knew exactly how to penetrate the hotel’s security.

“They came from somewhere in the back; they planned everything,” the chairman, Ratan Tata, said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN. “They went through the kitchen; they knew what they were doing.”

In Israel, while leaders publicly praised India for its response to the attack, questions also were raised about whether the commando mission to rescue hostages in the Jewish center, Nariman House, had been botched.

 

When this is the evidence being put forward, which one do you believe?