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?
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!
