India: still at sea

.: November 27, 2008

They came out from the sea, while the Indian security agencies remained paralysed. If anyone needed a lesson on how to conduct special operations from the sea, they could take a leaf out of the book of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai.

If anyone needed a lesson on how to conduct special operations from the sea, they could take a leaf out of the book of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai late on Wednesday, November 26, night. With two magazines of bullets taped together, strapped to their AK-47s, the men who arrived in speed boats from the sea could have easily been mistaken for naval commandos carrying out exercises off the coast. But they weren’t, and as a security expert told Outlook, "this is a quantum leap in terrorism in India. Global terror has finally come home."

In many ways, this was India’s 9/11, an attack on mainland India on a scale it has never witnessed before. For a nation that has dealt with armed insurgency and terrorism soon after independence, this was still an attack on an unprecedented scale. India was just not prepared for anything even remotely like it. "It is one thing to plant bombs and melt into the crowd. It is another to come in from the sea and launch an attack such as this," a senior intelligence official told Outlook.

So far what is known is that the email sent by the terrorists, claiming a group called the ’Deccan Mujahideen’ carried out the attack, has been traced back to Russia. Senior security officials say that it was, in all likelihood, sent by a Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) operative and this is perhaps the strongest indication of the real face behind the attack. Intelligence sources also point out that the current group of terrorists could have also got help from the Mumbai underworld as well as Chechen elements within the Russian Mafia which has already found a foothold in India.

So far, attacks of this scale and magnitude have been the hallmark of the LeT, be it storming a military camp on the outskirts of Jammu or any other similar attacks. If there is one terrorist organisation with the training, funds, manpower and support to conduct such a raid, then it is the LeT. The Hizbul Mujahideen have rarely stepped out of Kashmir and the Jaish-e-Mohammed, intelligence analysts say, and are not in a position to carry out such an attack. Which leaves the LeT, which, sources say, has been training for years. What’s more, its manpower and infrastructure all over Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir has been left intact by the US-led Global War On Terror.

In fact, areas where international tourists concentrate have frequently been on the radar of the Al Qaeda. A laptop recovered by British troops deployed in Iraq in 2006 revealed that two Al Qaeda operatives had conducted elaborate reconnaissance of several areas in Goa frequented by American and Israeli tourists. In fact, interrogations of terrorists picked up by the Karnataka police had also revealed that they were planning to hit the international community in India. And when the hit came, the terrorists went into Nariman House, the home to a Jewish family as well as the headquarters of an Israeli religious group - the Chabad Lubavitch. It was clearly not just a coincidence that the Trident Hotel was targeted where an Israeli conference on diamond exports and imports was taking place. Or that top managers who run corporations, also happened to be having their board meetings at the Taj and Trident hotels.

LeT’s links with the Al Qaeda have been well recorded in the past, and the scale and scope of this attack indicates that the latter group has finally left its footprint in India. So far, intelligence officials say, there were intermittent reports, based on electronic intelligence and intercepts, of the Al Qaeda building up a base in the higher reaches of the Pir Panjal mountain range. But when a ship is employed to launch an armed militia off the coast of Mumbai, it is adequate evidence to suspect an international hand in the current terrorist attack.

The Indian response, as usual, has left much to be desired.

Saikat DATTA © Outlook