Mumbai terror attacks 2008

Mumbai terror attacks: the making of a monster

 

The testimony of the only gunman captured alive after the Mumbai massacre in 2008 provided a unique insight into the mind of a terrorist. So what turned a boy from a farming village into a cold-blooded killer?

By Barney Henderson

9:00PM BST 12 Apr 2013         The London Telegraph

 

On the evening of November 26 2008 I was having a drink in one of Mumbai’s plethora of upmarket bars when I got a call from a journalist friend telling me there had been a bomb at Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station.

 

I sprinted out of the bar, caught a cab downtown and was one of the first reporters on the scene. It soon became clear the city was under attack. The Taj Mahal Palace and Trident-Oberoi hotels and a Jewish centre had been occupied by gunmen. A backpacker bar – which would have been the venue for our drinks had one of the group not been delayed – had been sprayed with bullets.

 

I spent that night and much of the following three days camped out at the various target sites as not only reporters but also police, the military and politicians tried to grasp what was happening. It was one of the most intricately planned terrorist attacks of recent years, which took New Delhi to the brink of war with Pakistan, and has become known as India’s 9/11. The attack had a significant impact on counter-terrorism strategies around the world, with security services put on high alert to the risk of 'Mumbai-style’ incursions on soft targets.

 

After a 59-hour siege ended with the shooting dead of the last terrorists holed up in Nariman House Jewish centre, the country was united in shock and grief. Ten young men had sailed from Pakistan armed with AK-47 assault rifles and carrying backpacks full of ammunition and attacked the city’s landmark sites with apparent ease, eventually killing 166 people, including 22 foreigners. The figurehead for the country’s collective hatred over 26/11, as it came to be called, was Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone surviving gunman.

 

Kasab was 21 when he strolled into the railway station carrying an AK-47 and indiscriminately shot at men, women and children. Grenades blew up those queuing for tickets in the snaking lines. Fifty-two people were killed and dozens more were injured as the vast ticket hall of the city’s busiest and most historic station – formerly called Victoria Terminus and inspired by St Pancras in London – was ruthlessly turned into a slaughterhouse.

 

Kasab, nicknamed the Butcher of Bombay (kasab means butcher in Urdu), was hanged last November, almost four years after the attack. His execution was welcomed by relations of the victims, the Indian authorities and the wider population as a chance to draw a line under the terror. Yet when I returned to Mumbai last year to conduct research for an MA in terrorism at King’s College London, it was clear that many questions remained about the life of Kasab.

 

What had propelled him from a farming village in rural Pakistan via military-style boot camps run by the Islamic terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and on to murder in Mumbai?

 

Kasab grew up in Faridkot, a small village in Pakistan’s Punjab. Consisting of a central dusty square bordered by tea stalls and food huts, the village is surrounded by cultivated rice fields. Kasab’s father, Amir Shahban, came from a family of butchers, but after becoming estranged from his parents he ended up in Faridkot hawking fried snacks in the square.

 

The Kasabs were not cripplingly poor, but when Shahban’s health began to deteriorate after he contracted tuberculosis, he took Ajmal Amir, then 11, out of school and sent him to work the family’s handcart.

 

Friends from Faridkot recalled a cheeky but not malevolent young boy who enjoyed karate and watching Bollywood films. 'He was very active, always jumping around. He loved watching films,’ Haji Mohammad Aslam, a neighbour, said. 'He would stay out until midnight watching TV in shops and street restaurants. But there was not evil in him, we can’t believe he would do this.’

 

Kasab didn’t want to become his father – he wanted to be something special. As he got older he became bored with his life selling fried snacks and sitting around the square’s tea stalls with the other village men at dusk while the women prepared dinner.

 

He began to fight regularly with his parents, usually over money. In 2005 Shahban decided to let his son move to Lahore to look for work, in the hope that he would send cash back to the family. His mother, Noor, said she would arrange a marriage for him, although Kasab was not keen to settle down.

 

Bewitched by the metropolis, he fell in with a group of street youths. Along with his new best friend, Muzaffar Lal, Kasab wandered from one temporary job to the next – washing plates in a restaurant, running errands for a guest house – but as the months drifted by, he realised his future was looking bleak. 'I was working hard, I was just not being paid well for my work,’ Kasab said in his written plea presented at his trial in July 2009, a copy of which was given to me while in Mumbai. Kasab and Muzaffar turned to petty crime, then burglary. But their hopes that crime would lift them to a better life were dashed after two unsuccessful break-ins and a failed attempt to buy a £30 colonial-era pistol.

They moved on to the city of Rawalpindi and, before long, were back working in the sweltering kitchen of a grimy backstreet restaurant, bereft of money, ideas and hope. Then, in December 2007, a chance encounter with a bearded Muslim preacher late one night at a market stall was to set Kasab and Muzaffar on to the path of jihad.

 

The man who recruited them was apparently called Shabaan Mustaq, a volunteer in the education arm of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), the political face of LeT, whose aim is to 'liberate’ Kashmir from India. Kasab spoke of his struggles to find work and his family’s need for money. Mustaq invited them to join the Jamaat, promising it would transform their lives. As they parted Kasab asked, 'And will they show us how to use guns?’ The man smiled and nodded.

 

Dr Christine Fair, a terrorism expert from Georgetown University in Washington, DC, who has studied the recruitment of young men into terrorist organisations, describes the appeal of LeT to young Pakistani potential recruits as its having the 'Rambo factor – even more of the “wow” factor than al-Qaeda’.

 

Mujahideen fighters for Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means Army of the Pure, are lionised by Islamic extremists across Pakistan. It is one of the most feared groups fighting for control of Kashmir, and has launched multiple strikes against India, including the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi.

 

Since the beginning of the conflict with India over control of Kashmir after the hasty break-up of the Raj in the aftermath of the Second World War, Pakistan has relied on militant organisations to carry out attacks across the border.

 

LeT was founded in 1986 – with state support – to kill Indians in Kashmir. But after Pakistan joined America in its 'War on Terror’ following the 9/11 attacks, LeT was added to a list of banned organisations by President Pervez Musharraf in 2002 under pressure from Washington. LeT acted quickly to establish JuD as a front organisation to serve as its public face, and it continued to operate much as it had before the ban, with offices in most Pakistani cities and support from members of the army.

 

The chance to become a fearless soldier fighting for his country certainly appealed to Kasab, and so began his journey into the world of Islamic extremism and training to become a Mujahideen, prepared to lay down his life for Allah.

 

Three days after their meeting with Mustaq, Kasab and Muzaffar reported to the JuD offices in Rawalpindi, and within days were enrolled in their first three-week course in Muridke, in the north east of Pakistan. Kasab spent the next 10 months in intensive preparation for the Mumbai attacks, which had already been carefully planned by LeT’s leaders.

 

He travelled the country, spending weeks at a time at various JuD and LeT bases – some public and some very secret – returning to his home village only once during that time. The training began with Islamic teachings and a build-up of anti-India propaganda, instilling the belief in the recruits that their neighbours were hated infidels.

 

Kasab and Muzaffar were moved around together to different camps, but never with the same group of recruits. They experienced a standard of food, lodgings and respect they could previously only have dreamt of. 'We were given the best food and the best clothes,’ Kasab recalled in his first interrogation by Mumbai police after his arrest. 'Chacha ['Uncle’ – Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a founding member of LeT and the chief planner of the Mumbai attacks] said we could have anything in the world we wanted before setting out for Mumbai.’

 

Religious indoctrination was constant. Prayer sessions started at 4am and continued throughout the day, interspersed with physical training, religious and political lectures, food and rest. One night, according to his testimony, Kasab and Muzaffar were told to get into a truck, which travelled in a convoy of vehicles to rural Kahori in the south east of the country.

 

They were introduced to the camp’s commander, named only as Major General Sahib [Sir], who was reportedly still a commissioned officer in the Pakistan army, to begin 21 days of advanced physical and combat training.

 

In February 2008 Kasab returned to Faridkot, but it was a short and unhappy homecoming. His mother implored him to stay and marry a girl from the village. According to a family friend, Kasab showed a few of the village boys his newfound wrestling skills and then asked his mother to bless him, saying he was going for jihad. Kasab’s parents, when interviewed the week after the attack by Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, denied that they knew he had joined a Mujahideen organisation. Kasab had originally told the police in Mumbai that his father had made him join LeT.

 

After a few hours at home, Kasab boarded a bus that would take him to his next camp and the start of his final preparation for jihad. Kasab had been singled out by LeT – he was completely committed to the cause, physically very fit and trained in commando techniques. It was not long before he was presented to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi.

 

 

Kasab had not held strong Islamic beliefs before he was recruited – a Mumbai policeman told me that in the months after his arrest he could not recite a single passage from the Koran. His understanding of jihad was flawed and simplistic. 'It [jihad] is about killing and getting killed and becoming famous,’ Kasab said at his first interrogation.

 

His handlers had filled him with hate by the promise of living out his military fantasies, being seen as a real man in the eyes of his fellow villagers, and providing 'riches’ for his family. 'Chacha told me it’s a very honourable and daring job,’ Kasab said. 'You earn respect, it’s the work of God.

 

We were told that our big brother India is so rich and we are dying of poverty and hunger. My father sells dahi wada in a stall and we did not even get enough food to eat from his earnings. I was promised that once they knew that I was successful in my operation, they would give 150,000 rupees [£1,000] to my family… Come, kill and die after a killing spree. By this, one will become famous and will also make Allah proud.’

 

Hundreds of young men and women are recruited to jihad organisations every year, in Pakistan and the world’s other terrorism hotspots such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Indonesia – not to mention in Western Europe and the US. In Pakistan many are radicalised at unregulated madrassas – Islamic schools described by the American writer Jeffrey Goldberg as 'jihad factories’.

The July 7 2005 London bombers allegedly spent time in a Pakistani madrassa. Recent reports, including one by Stanford and New York universities’ law schools last year, have suggested that the US drone programme, which has killed hundreds of civilians in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions, has facilitated recruitment to extremist groups and motivated violent attacks.

 

Seventy-four per cent of Pakistanis now consider the US to be the enemy, the report found. Groups such as LeT also gain footholds in communities by investing in charity projects; after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, JuD relief workers reacted more quickly and successfully than the government.

 

The assertion that poverty causes terrorism has been widely held by Western governments, particularly the Bush administration, which invested billions of dollars in development programmes in Pakistan in the hope of stopping the recruitment of terrorists. But as the case of Kasab highlights, there is never a single reason why teenagers and young men become radicalised.

 

 

LeT has shown a willingness to recruit both well-educated graduates for high-level operations (working undercover in India, for example), and low-level suicide attackers. Last year the group recruited two teenage boys, aged 12 and 13, to throw grenades at a police post in Sopore, in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state, in return for 1,000 rupees (£6.50).

 

'Lashkar recruited for the Mumbai mission as rational users of labour, in exactly the same way as McDonald’s,’ Dr Fair says. 'There is a market for terrorists, of both high quality and low quality. In Kasab’s case he was certainly an aberration from the other Lashkar recruits we have studied in the sense that he was only educated to 4th standard [age 10], whereas the average had 10th standard [age 16] education and above.

 

It was clear that he had a low aptitude and was recruited to be sent to India, go to a specific target and start killing people. He was then expected to die. It’s entirely possible that poverty played a role in his recruitment, but it isn’t always that simple.

 

Men are snatched up by these groups, often with messages about the US or India, brainwashed and then dispatched. We know that, from the time he was recruited, he was never left alone.’

 

Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi himself drilled in the final nails of propaganda the night before sending his team by boat from Karachi to Mumbai and what he thought would be their certain deaths. 'Your names will be etched in gold and every Pakistani will praise you,’ he assured them.

 

Kasab had excelled at target shooting and so he along with his partner Abu Ismail, a 25-year-old recruited from Pakistan’s lawless North West Frontier Province, had been selected for the most devastating mission of the attack. The other four teams of two had been briefed to attack the two five-star hotels, the Jewish centre and the backpackers’ bar, killing foreigners and taking hostages in an extended siege. Kasab and Abu Ismail were told 'to unleash hell’ inside the packed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST).

 

When they arrived at the station, seconds before he opened fire, Kasab was relaxed enough to walk calmly into the busy station lavatory and urinate. The two positioned themselves and nodded to each other, and then the sound of semi-automatic rifles began to resonate through the ticket hall. Many inside the station thought the noise was fireworks set off to celebrate India’s victory over England in a cricket match that evening.

 

Some of the policemen on duty did try to stop Kasab and Abu Ismail, but their wooden-framed, bolt-action rifles jammed and their lathi cane sticks were splintered by the AK-47 bullets. Some just fled. Kasab realised they would not meet any serious opposition inside the station, later recalling with disdain the 'simple weapons’ of the police on duty. The Mumbai police were completely outmanoeuvred and outgunned.

Kasab and Ismail killed 52 people in the station, seriously wounding another 104. An investigation by the FBI after the attack showed that most of the victims were hit in the head and chest – an indication of the terrorists’ high level training and skill as marksmen.

 

Kasab and Ismail then went on to attack a nearby hospital, killing seven. They managed to flee without being apprehended – despite the station and hospital being yards from the Mumbai police headquarters. They then delivered one of the most significant blows of the night by shooting dead three of the Mumbai police’s most senior and respected officers, after hiding in bushes and opening fire on the officers’ vehicle.

 

They were finally stopped three hours after the start of the attack, at a roadblock as they attempted to escape north into the Mumbai suburbs in a hijacked car. Ismail was shot dead at the scene. Kasab was shot (but not fatally) and captured by a police constable.

 

In his first interrogation in hospital, Kasab confidently batted away questions, spinning the police officer half-truths but revealing that they had been sent by Pakistan’s LeT. Despite the gravity of what he had just done Kasab mostly came across as relaxed and composed. In the early hours of the next morning, with the hotels and the Jewish centre still under siege, Rakesh Maria, the head of the state’s anti-terrorism squad, visited him. Kasab was made to sit on the floor, then Maria said, 'There is no point in hiding things. We know how to wrench the truth out of you.’

 

Over the next four hours, Kasab began to give Maria precise details about the attack and his Pakistani handlers, which the police chief was then able to pass on to the army commandos trying to end the ongoing siege. Maria told Kasab that he had already interviewed other members of the team and 'knew everything’ about Kasab’s life and entry into LeT, but wanted to hear it 'from Kasab’s mouth’.

 

 

'I don’t care for your pain. You look in my eyes and tell me how many of you have landed in Mumbai…I don’t like lies, Kasab,’ he said. Eventually Kasab told Maria the names of the nine other terrorists. He spoke about his life in Lahore, how he had left school aged 11 and worked as a labourer. He explained that the various training camps comprised about 25 young men, but, aside from Muzaffar, he was not allowed to socialise with them. 'We were not allowed to know each other,’ he said.

 

Kasab explained to Maria how at his penultimate camp in Kashmir, the recruits were taught how to handle explosives, rocket launchers and mortars. The group was whittled down to 16 young men, but three escaped.

 

'We, the remaining 13, were then sent to a training camp at Muridke. Here we were trained to operate GPS instruments and to navigate boats in the sea. We were conditioned to sail on the high seas for long.’ The final 10 were 'shifted to a LeT safehouse at Azizabad in Karachi in the second week of September. Here we were told to carry out the Mumbai operation.

 

The operation was initially planned for September 27 but then got delayed, the reasons for which I do not know [LeT had found out the Indian authorities were expecting an attack from Pakistan]. Initially we knew each other only by our code names. But soon we told each other our real names, though we were not supposed to. But we bonded well and shared many personal details.’

 

In his instructions for the CST attack, Kasab said that he and Ismail had been instructed to 'kill until the last breath’, to 'keep shooting as long as you could until you die’. Unlike the other four teams, who were instructed to target white Westerners, Kasab and Ismail were told simply to kill anyone in their path.

 

Kasab’s disclosures subsequently helped with the arrest of several other Lashkar operatives, such as David Headley, the American who, in January, was sentenced to serve 35 years’ imprisonment in Chicago.

 

Dr Fair points out that it was incredibly inconvenient for LeT that Kasab was apprehended and then revealed details of the group – which has never claimed responsibility for the attack – and about the attack itself. 'The LeT modus operandi is that you either escape so you can be recycled, or you get killed.

 

You’re certainly not supposed to get caught. Kasab got caught, and he squealed like a pig. He ultimately failed in that sense.’

Maria, who was in charge of operations from the Mumbai police control room on the night of the attacks, was subsequently appointed chief investigator of the 26/11 case.

 

In the six weeks after the attack Maria interviewed Kasab several times. He told me that he was able to 'break’ Kasab using the 'good cop/bad cop’ technique. 'People ask, how could he break down as he is a trained terrorist, but we are trained interrogators,’ he said. 'You have to be a little angry, a little soft with him. Within 24 hours we were able to break him and get the details.’

 

Offering a unique insight into Kasab’s possible motivation, Maria told me that Kasab was 'totally indoctrinated’ – but not by religion. 'He felt what he was doing was right. He felt like he was in a war-like situation and he was a soldier entering another country. He was intelligent. He was unemployed and had no status in his village.

 

These people [LeT handlers] very cleverly exploited the feeling of being an unknown identity to all of a sudden being somebody important. Prior to the training he was being rebuked by his parents for having no job. He was being rebuked by the elders for being unemployed and for being a nobody in the village. His friends and others did not give him any importance. He went for training and he comes back as a LeT man, a jihadi.

 

 Now that earlier image gives way. His parents treat him with respect. There is some sort of sanctity with the social acceptability.’

 

 

 

 

Kasab told Maria that he had met Hafiz Saeed, the head of LeT, at a training camp. 'He said we would die waging jihad, our faces would glow like the moon. Our bodies would emanate scent. And we would go to paradise.’ A month after the attacks,

 

Maria took Kasab to a Mumbai morgue. The nine bodies of his fellow terrorists lay decomposing, covered in flies. The stench was overpowering and Kasab stared at the ground, tears rolling down his face. 'He kept saying that “my handlers always told me that this life is not important, the next life is very important and you will see that when you die for the cause there is a glow on your face and there is scent emanating from your body when you die in the cause of jihad”. The bodies were charred because they had been burnt in the gunfights. There was a stink, so I asked him, “Where is the glow?”

 

'When he saw his compatriots, lying like that, with bullet holes, charred bodies, it came as a shock. I wouldn’t say that he was showing remorse at that point. I think the only sadness was that he finally realised that he was taken for a ride.’

 

Kasab spent the next four years in isolation in a specially made bullet- and bomb-proof cell. One of his jailors has described how, as the nights rolled by, he began sobbing 'like a baby’ and calling out for his mother. His only time out of the cell came during his trial in April 2009, where he mainly sat day after day in silence, sometimes smiling shyly at the female journalists covering the case.

 

He was found guilty of all 86 charges including murder, conspiracy, and waging war against India.

 

Devika Rotawan, who identified Kasab in court, was 11 years old when she went to CST to catch a late train. 'I was going to Pune with my father and brother. Suddenly, armed men opened fire and, as I was trying to escape it, one bullet hit my stomach. I fell unconscious.

Kasab was laughing as he fired aimlessly at us,’ she said. The public prosecutor in the case, Ujjwal Nikam, is clear in his conviction that Kasab was 'pure evil’. 'He was very intelligent, very sharp,’ Nikam explained. 'He was fully knowing of what he’d done. The photograph of him killing people at CST – Kasab was enjoying that, taking pleasure. He was laughing. It is clear that he had no repentance or remorse.’

 

Kasab’s three state-appointed lawyers saw him differently. One of them, Abbas Kazmi, told me that Kasab realised the enormity of what he had done and that 'emotionally, he was like any normal human being’. 'It is far-fetched what has been reported through the prosecution – that this person was crafty and remorseless.

 

If you see a young man aged 20, 21, and the places where they come from, a lot of poverty, no academic background and no one to support them – such people could easily fall prey to brainwashing.’

 

Kasab was sentenced to death in March 2010. When, after a series of appeals, his sentence was upheld for the final time by the supreme court at the end of August last year, Kasab, then 25, reportedly pleaded with another of his lawyers, Raju Rama­chandran, in desperation to 'please help me get out of jail’.

 

But in the days leading up to his hanging, his jailors said that the crying at night stopped and Kasab fell silent and calm.

 

He was asked if he wanted to speak to his family, but replied 'No’ – though he did request that his mother, Noor, be informed of his death. Kasab was hanged at twilight on the morning of November 21 2012 in the grounds of Yerwada prison in the neighbouring city of Pune.

 

Given the codename Operation X, the execution was shrouded in such secrecy that even the prime minister did not know it was happening.

 

 

 

 

Kasab, the killer with the child’s smile who gave terror a face and name, had no last request, but his final words were recorded as: 'Allah ki kasam, dobara aisi galti nahin karunga [I swear by God, I will not commit such a mistake ever again].’ He was buried in the prison grounds. Nobody representing his family or Pakistani authorities was witness or claimed the body.

 

The Kasab family disappeared the week after the attack and have not been seen or heard from since. In Faridkot life continues as normal. On the side of a building on the road out of the village is daubed in large red Urdu lettering, go for jihad!