The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Mumbai

by Cathy Scott-Clark

  Muzaffarabad

  High above the House of the Holy Warriors training complex, a circle of tents was pitched in the thin air of the upper camp. Ajmal Kasab and his comrades lay inside, lean after seven months of praying, running and shooting. Their blood ran faster in their veins and they talked among themselves of their ‘falcon spirit’ being ready to pounce on its prey. They knew their trainers, Qahafa the Bull and Al-Qama, better than their fathers and now they were told by them to go home to make their goodbyes to their families. Ajmal was handed 1,300 rupees (£10) for the journey, with instructions to impress on his mother how izzat (honour) would be bestowed for giving her son to a higher cause. In Faridkot, she was delighted to see him, cooking biryani like he was a bridegroom and she was giving him away. When news spread of his arrival, neighbours came to pay their respects, too, noting that Ajmal seemed withdrawn. He wanted to stay at home, he said, and welled up when he left for the bus stop. He arrived back at the House of the Holy Warriors seven days later to discover their group had shrunk once more.

  Those left in the dwindling band were told to rename themselves with kunyah, or battle aliases, a sign that they had been born again into a new family of the pure. Ajmal could not think of anything original. In the end he chose the most obvious, Abu Mujahid, while Hafiz Arshad became Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ (the elder) and Shoaib became Abu Soheb. Naseer Ahmed, the skinny runt, became Abu Umer. They all signed pre-written wills that declared how their breasts shone with purity and how they desired to quench their anger on the battlefield, before celebrating with a film show, sitting in a circle around Al-Qama, watching fidayeen attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir. When someone asked if they would be heading over the Line of Control, too, Al-Qama was elliptical in his response.

  He was a veteran at preparing fidayeen for martyrdom, a task that he often bragged required him to infantilize the would-be commandos, instilling in them a child-like reverence, so that when they had to contemplate their own deaths or the killing of others, they would submit to orders that a freethinking adult would baulk at. He was particularly good on psychology and had spent much time analysing the make-up of each recruit so that when the time came he would match the strongest with the weakest.

  By the next morning, the group had got smaller still. Al-Qama revealed that one team had already been assigned, and was en route to Indian-administered Kashmir. Out of an original pool of thirty-two trainees, there were only fifteen left, and in August they returned to the warm campus of Muridke, outside Lahore. In the stagnating Lashkar swimming pool, down the far end of the camp, they practised treading water for hours and recovered objects thrown into the viscous water.

  The group shrank again when two recruits ran away. Not everyone wanted to become a martyr. Al-Qama told chacha he needed a date for Operation Bombay. The longer it took to launch, the more time there was for the boys to brood.

  Ajmal conceded to the others that he was terrified, and wished he had stayed home with his mother. Abdul Rehman ‘Chhota’ (little) was suffering more than any of them. Once known as Mohammed Altaf, he came from the brick kilns of a village so impoverished it had only a number, 511, located thirty miles from Vehari, the Punjab’s City of Cotton. Breaking the rules, Chhota called home a dozen times, and was overheard asking a family member to pay Lashkar to free him.

  The outfit could not lose another recruit and Abu Shoaib was ordered to mentor the desperate Chhota. Although he was the youngest at only eighteen, Shoaib, with his unruly black curls, dense eyebrows and stubby jaw, had emerged as a resilient fighter. After a martyrdom lecture, Al-Qama had asked if anyone was scared. Shoaib had raised his hand. ‘What is there to be scared of when the only thing to look forward to in this life is death,’ he told the class.

  Al-Qama gathered them all together, waited for quiet and asked them to close their eyes ‘There is nothing more a brother can give than his life for jihad,’ he told them. ‘And his reward will be infinite.’

  September 2008 – Karachi

  Early in the month, an apprehensive Ajmal Kasab and twelve others were put on a train for Karachi, with no idea where they were to be deployed. The group included Ajmal’s sidekicks Umer, Abdul Rehman and Shoaib, and were lodged in a place codenamed ‘Azizabad’. That was the name of an upmarket district in central Karachi, and Lashkar used it to misdirect snoopers, as their ‘Azizabad’ was actually in a secret compound in Yousaf Goth, a district in the far north of Karachi, Pakistan’s volatile seaside megalopolis. If there is safety in numbers, then here in the City of Lights, among the 21 million legal residents, anything could be hidden.

  Azizabad looked like any other family house. But behind its curly iron gates and permanently closed curtains were dorms and a classroom stocked with navigational training manuals, procured by the ISI’s double agent, ‘Honey Bee’. A map of the Indian coastline was pinned to the wall. For relaxation, there was a small library of jihadi magazines and pamphlets, including the Lashkar primer, Why are We Waging Jihad? But after the kinetic camps the boys found it hard to sit around. Since the holy month of Ramadan had also begun, the team were fasting, which only served to increase everyone’s fractiousness. When they were not attending training sessions, they mostly slept, idling away the hours until sundown – when they could eat.

  An instructor from Muridke, Abu Hamza, joined them. Although only a lowly soldier in the outfit, he was the perfect fit for Operation Bombay. His real name was Syed Zabiuddin Ansari, and he was a 28-year-old Indian by birth, raised in the rural hinterlands of central Maharashtra. He knew Mumbai well. Fluent in Marathi, Hindi and Urdu, he had travelled to Pakistan in his teens, settling in the southern Punjab. Radicalized by watching TV footage of the devastating anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, he had joined Lashkar. They placed him back in India in 2006 to amass a weapons stockpile and assist in a series of bomb blasts. His tradecraft had been poor, his cover blown in under a year, with many fellow mujahideen slain and jailed, leaving Lashkar with no alternative other than to ex-filtrate him back to Pakistan, via Bangladesh, in a costly operation that had left the outfit’s sura keen to expel him.

  But now, using the name Hamza, he had been given a second chance with a job that even this accident-prone Indian mujahid could not foul up. Hamza began to teach Ajmal and the team serviceable Marathi and Hindi so they could talk to a taxi driver and ask for directions. India was a fearful and foreign concept to the boys, so while he was at it Hamza also explained the Hindu caste system, how they ate and prayed. He coached them in its culture, while outside the gates of Azizabad a Lashkar procurement operation was stepped up.

  Since April 2008, Lashkar had amassed an Operation Bombay war chest of 2,168,000 rupees (£14,000). The outfit was so used to being sheltered by the ISI that its moneyman did not even bother to use an alias, keeping the funds in his own account at the Allied Bank in Drigh Colony, Karachi.

  The moneyman rented safe houses for Lashkar instructors, ten of whom would assist the running of Operation Bombay, and he gave 180,000 rupees (£1,175) to a Lashkar lieutenant and registered boat operator to buy an outboard engine from ARZ Water Sports in Karachi. He purchased sixteen life jackets, an air pump, inflatable dinghies and a boat, the Al-Hussaini, a legal carrier, with a Port Clearance Certificate (PCC) BFD-5846 issued by Pakistan Customs. As backup, he bought a second smaller boat, the Al-Fouz, paying 80,000 rupees (£522) in cash, and leased a third, the Al-Atta. Next he recruited fourteen sailors, signing up a Lashkar sympathizer as tindal (coxswain), who was given the codename Hakim-saab. They could rely on Hakim as he had helped them in smuggling operations the previous year.

  The boat operator’s father, known as ‘the ‘Hajji’, was also put to work scouting for a launch spot, settling on a forty-eight-acre site with five thatched huts and a three-bedroomed brick house in Goth Ali Nawaz Shah, a village beyond the south-eastern fringes of the sprawling city. Less than a mile from a creek that flowed out to the Arabian Sea, it was the perfect spot to learn the basics of sailing and clamberin
g in and out of boats. Here the recruits could prepare for the unpredictable open waters without drowning or being overlooked. The coast guard was reporting unseasonal swells, with massive waves pounding the shores. The newspapers were full of death notices.

  Two days after arriving in Karachi, Ajmal and the others visited. Glad to be outside, they happily practised deflating and inflating dinghies, capsizing and righting the boats, stripping down, drying and oiling their weapons after they had been dunked. They unpacked large zinc chests, padded out with pink foam. Inside were detonators, sticky tins of powdered RDX explosive, grenades and cartridges. The first bomb assembly classes began immediately, and afterwards they ventured out into open waters for the first time. For landlocked boys who had lived their lives in the arid scrub, it must have been terrifying.

  One hour out from the shore, they glimpsed the Al-Hussaini. Hakim-saab, the coxswain, welcomed them on board and familiarized them with marine charts, explaining the basics of navigation. Over the next two days, they learned how to use the boat’s GPS system and perfected their cover as a fishing expedition, flinging nets and hauling them in, roasting the fish they caught on a brazier at night, all of them desperate to know when they were sailing and where to.

  After three days, Al-Qama turned up. Phase one was over. He announced that he was taking the team back to the dry and cool of the mountains. It took twenty-four hours to reach the House of the Holy Warriors, where amir Hafiz Saeed and chacha Zaki greeted them with unsettling news. The group that had been living and training together for many months was to be divided. Six of them had been assigned a mission in Kashmir that had just jumped the queue. They all waited anxiously for their names to be called. Ajmal Kasab was not on the list. What had they in mind for him? Lashkar was like a conveyor belt that never gave self-doubt time to seed.

  After their colleagues had departed, chacha introduced three new men. ‘They are fidayeen like you,’ he explained, understanding how difficult it would be to integrate the new faces. Ajmal discovered that two of the new boys, Fahadullah and Javed, were from villages in his home district of Okara. As they ate, Fahadullah, twenty-four, revealed he was the nephew of Qahafa the Bull. He had two fingers missing from his left hand, which the boys assumed was a battle wound and seemed, in these jittery days, strangely reassuring. In fact it was a birth defect, but the boy had been told by his uncle not to tell anyone, lest they think him unlucky.

  Javed was from Gugera, a village north of Okara, the youngest of seven, and had spent his childhood in a madrassa. At sixteen he told his parents he intended to join Lashkar. His father, a grain trader, had been furious and tried to marry him off to a fourteen-year-old neighbour. Javed had run away, taking shelter in Lashkar’s district HQ at Okara. From there he was smuggled to the Muridke campus, where he disappeared into the training regime, shed his real family and joined another, taking the battle name Abu Ali.

  The third new arrival, Ismail Khan, from a North West Frontier Province town of the same name, was the only non-Punjabi in the group. He kept to himself until the thirteenth day of the Roza (as the Ramadan fast days are known) – 13 September – when amir Hafiz Saeed returned, alongside the Major General.

  ‘The time for jihad has now come,’ the amir solemnly announced, taking his familiar stance, hands against chest. Ajmal recalled the silence that followed, as if everyone had inhaled. ‘You are to attack mainland India.’ Ajmal, who had always presumed he was heading for Indian-administered Kashmir, was stunned. Before he could process the information, chacha Zaki stepped forward to speak. ‘The financial clout of India is created in the powerhouse of Bombay. You are to attack using a sea route.’ Ajmal looked around and could see that the others were just as shocked. Lashkar operations rarely strayed into major Indian cities. Behind him, the Major General grinned broadly. He whispered into Zaki’s ear before Lashkar’s commander continued: ‘Are you all ready?’ The room stayed silent. Zaki tried again: ‘The Major General Sahib wants to see how well-prepared you are.’

  He took the quaking boys outside and issued them with AK-47s and rounds. ‘Load up and rip up the targets. Fire as many as you want to,’ Zaki ordered. The ten let loose, drilling shots into targets until their eyes streamed.

  Then they were taken into a part of the camp they had not seen before, entering a room filled with TVs and maps of capital cities from around the world. It was Lashkar’s data centre and they were introduced to Abu Zarrar Shah, the outfit’s media chief. He had spent the last few months assembling a portable communications network, designed by a team of young, unemployed IT graduates, recruited by Lashkar in Dubai, Karachi and the Gulf States, and codenamed ‘the Owls’.

  Experimenting with Internet telephony, the Owls had conceived an invisibility cloak to remotely control the gunmen after they landed in Mumbai while shielding Lashkar’s involvement. Zarrar’s men had rented Internet phone lines and phone numbers from Call-phonex, a company in New Jersey. The legitimate service was popular among migrant customers who needed to make cheap calls to family and friends thousands of miles away, using a VoIP system similar to Skype. The gunmen in Mumbai would be able to use local, prepaid Indian SIM cards, to dial leased international numbers in Austria that diverted the calls via Callphonex to Pakistan. It would be difficult for Indian investigators to unravel, as everything beyond the US hub was invisible.

  The transaction with Callphonex had been made online, Zarrar passing himself off as a reseller based in India, the money sent as a wire transaction that would at some point trigger suspicion, as it originated in Islamabad. But by then the operation would be under way. ‘Zarrar Shah had great knowledge of computers,’ Ajmal recalled, dazed by the equipment that he worried was too complicated for all of them to master. Zarrar reassured him that he would have to do nothing other than press the green call button on his Nokia twice, in order to be connected to his Lashkar handlers back in Pakistan.

  The Owls had had another simple idea. Zarrar showed Ajmal how he was using Google Earth to zoom into and around a city that none of them had ever visited, travelling through it at street level. Once their individual missions had been allocated, Google Earth would be their guide, companion and tour operator.

  Taken back outside, Qahafa the Bull and Al-Qama ‘buddied them up’ into five teams of two, a classic fidayeen formation. Qahafa and Al-Qama had psychologically anatomized the men, working hard to identify types that would complement each other. Team one would be Ajmal Kasab and Ismail, where Ismail was the hard-stepping lead man, capable of carrying impressionable Ajmal, who Lashkar feared could flip or run. Team two was Umar and Akasha, who were similarly balanced. Team three: Shoaib and Umer. Team four: Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ and Ali. And team five: Abdul Rehman ‘Chhota’ and Fahadullah, the nephew of Qahafa.

  The attack was planned for the twenty-seventh day of Roza, 27 September 2008, which gave them only two weeks. ‘You will reach Bombay by hijacking an Indian boat.’ The boys were overwhelmed, Ajmal unable to countenance how any of this would be achieved or what his role would be. The Arabian Sea scared them all. The idea of a marine hijacking was terrifying. Hauling an anchor, navigating the undulating currents on their own, landing on a foreign shore, charging into an alien city at night, all of these things weighed on him. Even worse, the proposed date for the attack was also his twenty-first birthday.

  Finally, Zaki named the targets, most of which they had never heard of: Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Malabar Hill, the Leopold Café, the Trident–Oberoi hotel, Chabad House and the Taj hotel. Two teams of two each would focus on the last, the most important target.

  They were to maim and kill as many people as possible from America, Britain, and Israel ‘because these people have severely oppressed Muslims’. They were to keep in mind ‘that no Muslim should succumb in the attack’. To create maximum chaos, each attacker would also carry an RDX bomb and plant it at a congested location, making it appear that there were many more fidayeen fanning across the city than just ten. The attack was to start at 7
.30 p.m., the busiest time of day. Even though it appeared daunting, the nuts and bolts of the mission were simple, said Al-Qama, calling up each team in turn to brief them quietly on their specific target.

  Ajmal and Ismail would mow down commuters at CST before heading up into Malabar Hill, where they would cull the rich. Shoaib and Umer would kill tourists with assault rifles and grenades at the Leopold Café, before joining Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ and Ali to raid the Taj hotel, which they were to set alight, seizing hostages.

  Umar (real name Nasir) and Akasha would lay siege to Chabad House, capturing Jews, executing them on orders. Fahadullah and Abdul Rehman ‘Chhota’ were to storm the Trident–Oberoi hotel, killing guests and staff, before taking captives.

  Each team were shown videos of their target, filmed months ago by David Headley. They studied the complex map he had helped build, overlaid with GPS waypoints, showing how the targets could be accessed from the sea, by taxis and on foot. Those going into the Taj were shown a 3D animation that Zarrar had found on Google Earth, paid for by the hotel as a marketing tool. It enabled them to travel around the south and north wings of the Palace, to spin around the Tower, as well as trotting by the entrances and exits, and along Merry Weather Road towards the Leopold Café.

  Qahafa took the floor. To blend in, each fidayeen would be given fake ID cards with Hindu names, showing them to be students of the Arunodaya Degree College in Hyderabad. They were asked to memorize their new IDs. ‘No one will suspect you. Even the police will be misled.’

  Crucially, the trainers – Qahafa the Bull, Al-Qama and Hamza, as well as Zarrar Shah – would be with the team all the way. Lashkar was preparing a control room kitted out with phones, computers, TV screens and detailed maps of Mumbai so the trainers could advise, cajole and steer the operation, minute by minute. The control room would be located in Malir Town, an upmarket military cantonment in Karachi, one of the city’s plushest residential enclaves, close to the international airport. The area was patrolled by the security services round the clock – making it the safest place to be, if you were a proxy of the state.