The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Mumbai

by Cathy Scott-Clark

  Ratan Kapoor and Nick Edmiston went their own ways after Mumbai, the former moving into India’s nascent Formula 1 project and the latter opening new offices in Mexico City, Sã o Paolo and Moscow. They helped Dion Liveras repatriate his father’s body to London, where Andreas’s daughter told Nick that they felt that his ‘circle of life’ had been completed. The Liveras family held a lavish funeral at a Greek Cypriot church in North London and in 2010 the Alysia was renamed Moonlight II and Edmiston sold it on behalf of the family for £60m. After recovering from his own injuries, Andreas’s cruise director, Remesh Cheruvoth, returned to work for the Liveras family, running a super-yacht that Dion had named after his father. When we last caught up, he had arrived in London, where he was managing the assets of a Saudi tycoon.

  For Vishwas Patil the Mumbai attacks have still not been adequately explained or investigated and they represent anything but a failure of imagination. Despite his personal feelings, Patil became a hero in Maharashtra, a role model for provincial boys from ordinary families who previously viewed the police service as elitist, his public lectures about 26/11 winning millions of hits on YouTube. He was promoted to Additional Commissioner of Police West Region, moving to Bandra, Mumbai’s glamorous seaside suburb loved by Bollywood’s stars, where we met him in a seafront office with floor-to-ceiling windows. His batch-mate Rajvardhan Sinha was also feted, becoming the new Additional Commissioner Police (economic offences wing) in Mumbai, working from the Crime Branch offices, near Crawford Market.

  The Black Cats created a forensic account of every minute wasted and submitted it to the Home Ministry. It is an astonishing document that still makes soldiers angry and details how a combined task force was unofficially mobilized at 10.05 p.m., on Wednesday, 26 November 2008, just twenty-two minutes after the first shots were fired in Leopold’s. By 10.30 p.m., the Black Cats were ready to deploy to the technical area of the nearby Palam airstrip, but it would take another seventy minutes for the Cabinet Secretary, the highest civil servant in the land, to contact the NSG Chief, Jyoti Dutt, warning of a mobilization without giving the go-ahead or revealing transport arrangements.

  At 00.12 the Joint Secretary Police (Internal Security), called the NSG, also warning mobilization was likely, without giving the green light, but promising to get a plane from the Chief of the Air Staff. Three minutes later, Brigadier Govind Singh Sisodia (DIG Ops) moved the task force to Palam airstrip. At 00.34 the most senior civil servant in the ministry, Madhukar Gupta, the Home Secretary, called with news that Maharashtra’s Chief Minister had finally called for the NSG. They had a ‘go’ three hours after the first shots had been fired in the Colaba Causeway, the review concluded.

  However, when Dutt called the Air Chief asking for their plane, he was informed the transporter was 156 miles away in Chandigarh, leaving him to call the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s insular foreign intelligence service, for help. RAW agreed to lend an Ilyushin 76, parked at Palam airstrip. But it could only carry 120 troops and their kit, meaning the Black Cats would have to make three trips to Mumbai to scramble a force large enough to counter the raids. The crew were also missing, RAW revealed, and the transporter had not been fuelled. Finding them and filling the Ilyushin would delay the mission further.

  Dutt was so anxious that he called the Home Secretary at 00.54, only to find that he was stranded in Pakistan, on government business, and could not get a flight until the morning. ‘Don’t let them take you hostage,’ the NSG chief joked bitterly.

  Finally, at 01.45, when chief Dutt tried to leave for the airstrip he was requested to pick up the Home Secretary from his residence, despite advising the minister’s household that this meant a significant deviation from his route. When they arrived at Palam, they found the Black Cats humping their heavy kit by hand into the Ilyushin as no lifting gear was available. The plane took off around 02.30, with a flight time of almost three hours to a city where the slaughter in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus had started and finished, multiple bombs had exploded, and sieges had set in at Chabad House, the Trident–Oberoi and the Taj.

  Around 05.30, Thursday, 27 November, the NSG finally touched down in Mumbai, one hour after the gunmen inside the Taj had begun hunting guests down in the hotel’s darkened cellars having shot up the Kitchen Brigade. However, the report concluded, the promised convoy to transport them downtown did not show. Although a flurry of white Ambassadors and armed outriders turned out for the Home Secretary, there was no convoy to transport the NSG. It would take several more hours to unpack the plane, by hand, commandeer local buses and ferry the Black Cats to the city.

  The NSG report also repeated earlier warnings that had been submitted to the ministry as far back as 2006. Then Dutt had written to explain that its mobilization strategy was ‘critically flawed’. From Delhi it took more than two and a half flying hours to reach most other cities. The NSG proposed creating four regional hubs, but the proposals went unanswered. So did a second report advising the ministry that the Black Cats were ‘limping along’ because of corruption and lethargy in procurement. Presently the men were ‘woefully ill-equipped’. Applications for lightweight boots, Kevlar helmets and modern body armour, as well as hands-free communications sets, were in limbo. They were short of high-powered thermal-imaging units; their lightweight ladders dated from 1985; and they had no useable night vision devices, with one ministry official conceding that the NSG was ‘as good as blind’ and ‘could only work effectively in daylight’.

  When the Black Cats flew into Mumbai it was a triumph of men over machinery, chief Dutt reflected to us. The only thing the NSG could be glad about, touching down in the city, was that eight months earlier when they had been deputed to secure a meeting in Delhi, chief Dutt had insisted that thirty Black Cats don their civvies to mingle in a five-star hotel, the first time any of them had been inside a luxurious establishment.

  While the public sector floundered, the private sector marched ahead. On 21 December 2008, three weeks after the siege ended, and after surveyors reported that the hotel had not suffered any significant structural damage, the Tata Group took out newspaper advertisements to announce the hotel would soon be back in business: ‘Welcome Home Again . . . Mumbai will rediscover its nesting place and will play host to the world.’

  Brigadier Sisodia retired from the NSG and was recruited as Head of Physical Security by the Tata Group. As we walked around the Taj with him, every nook was a foxhole, and every landing a victory relived, all told of in visceral re-enactments. At the Taj, the Chambers, the Tower and most of the restaurants reopened before Christmas that year. The restored Crystal Room, Sea Lounge and other public areas of the Palace wing reopened the following March. Some rooms were renamed, Sabina’s Sunrise Suite becoming the Bella Vista Suite. The hotel staged a grand relaunch in August 2010, after spending £24m getting itself straight, having become, in the words of the US President, Barack Obama, who visited that November, ‘a symbol of the strength and resilience of the Indian people’.

  Backstage, Hemant Oberoi, the hotel’s Grand Executive Chef, was reinstalled in his cabin on the first floor and the Kitchen Prayer was put back on the wall of the chefs’ staffroom, along with the group photograph by Ian Pereira that shows the senior chefs in their whites, wielding the tools of their trade. With the help of Nitin Minocha, the Golden Dragon chef, whose arm was eventually saved, Oberoi’s Kitchen Brigade returned to work, stepping into the blood-logged kitchens to hold a multi-faith puja or cleansing ritual, then organized new uniforms, crockery and menus for all the restaurants. Chef Oberoi also had a marble slab engraved with the names of those who were killed. Chef Raghu came back from the dead, too, and returned to the Taj after making his stand against the gunmen assailing Chambers.

  Others looked further afield, including Shamiana’s manager, Amit Peshave. Immediately after the attacks, despite having lost so many friends, including Hemant Talim of the Golden Dragon, who succumbed to his injuries four days after the attacks, he returned to
the Taj. However, he quit and married in 2009, to try his hand working in Europe, although he hopes to return to Mumbai in the near future. We spent three long evenings with him in London, reliving 26/11 and all that he had witnessed. Amit told us how the six-year-old boy he tried to rescue from the Harbour Bar toilets was eventually reunited with his parents and how he is still in touch with the British man whose life he saved but who wanted to remain anonymous.

  Florence Martis also distanced herself from the hotel. Awaking from a deep sleep several days after being rescued by the Black Cats, she finally learned that the body of her father had been located in the Sion Hospital mortuary, where he had been identifiable only by the ring he wore. More than 2,000 people turned out for his funeral, which was widely reported in newspapers and on TV. ‘He got the death he wanted, but not in the way he imagined,’ Florence said, showing us local newspaper cuttings that had been laminated. A year after the tragedy, she returned briefly to the Taj kitchens to stand in the meat store where her father had been shot. ‘It was so cold,’ she told us, ‘I could not last there even one minute.’ Florence now works at the Thane headquarters for the Tata group’s Ginger hotels. Her mother took a job at the Taj Public Services Welfare Trust – working to help other victims of the attacks.

  Karambir Kang is also still with the Taj group, but no longer in India. One year after 26/11, he married Priya Nagrani, an old college friend, in a low-key ceremony in Pune, and moved to the United States, where he became director of Taj Hotels in the Americas and General Manager of the Taj Boston. He remains in touch with Nikhil, Sabina’s brother, both of them having shared many thoughts on loss and grieving.

  We discovered many of the most important pieces of the story over the border, in the villages of the Pakistani Punjab, where Lashkar continues to thrive. After months of gruelling exploration, we located many relatives of the team of ten gunmen and found that all had been told the same story by Lashkar in the weeks after 26/11, one that had been later rammed home by the ISI – which warned them of the severe consequences of talking. Their sons/brothers/nephews had been martyred in Kashmir, they were told. Some had been killed in battle. Others had drowned in rivers or were frozen to death crossing mountain passes. None had been killed in Mumbai. ‘That’s a fiction created by India and America,’ one father told us, unswervingly, even when confronted with photos of his son’s body lying in a Mumbai morgue.

  In the Punjab, Sindh and Islamabad, we shadowed Pakistan’s internal inquiry into the Mumbai assaults, which was a hamstrung affair. The Federal Investigative Authority, the Islamic Republic’s would-be FBI, staffed by diligent investigators, had never previously been allowed to probe Lashkar. But following the global outcry generated by 26/11, the FIA was given the go-ahead, although in a limited way, tracing the Mumbai cash and procurements operation, probing the careers of three of the gunmen and several of their controllers, as well as the outfit’s quartermaster. One of those at the heart of the investigation, the FIA lawyer and prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, who provided much insight and many legal documents, told us that the Mumbai inquiry was an albatross. He was gunned down on his way to work in Islamabad in May 2013, and the case remains unsolved. Along the way Pakistan blamed India for failing to present clear and admissible evidence, a gripe that was true in several important instances, although FIA investigators privately wondered at the complexity and reach of Operation Bombay, which many of them believed could not have been carried out without official knowledge and sanction.

  There were yet more double-games afoot, according to the FIA. Investigators believed that Washington, too, chose to ignore the building evidence against Lashkar, wary of unsettling the Pakistan military whose support was needed to aid the US fight against the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda. David Headley was also tolerated by his sponsors in the US intelligence community, these same investigators believe, so long as he remained a potential source that might eventually lead them to the most prized goal in those days: Osama bin Laden.

  These views have powerful backers among the French and British security sources, who told us about the dossier given to the Americans in 2007, warning of a new global terror axis with Lashkar at its centre.

  Sajid Mir had come up on the radar of Western intelligence services as far back as 2003, when he began to recruit Caucasian and African converts, ‘clean skins’, to mobilize for future operations that were in breach of Lashkar’s covenant with Pakistan’s military to focus solely on Indian-administered Kashmir.

  In compelling detail, the European dossier explained how one of these operations involved a French convert recruited by Lashkar whose arrest in October 2003 exposed a well-advanced plot by the outfit to strike against a nuclear installation in Australia. This plot was one of Lashkar’s first attempts at an international spectacular. The French detainee’s interrogation led Western intelligence agencies to identify dozens more recruits like him in Europe and the US, jihadi ‘sleepers’ who were waiting to be activated to mount attacks that included ‘multiple raids on luxury hotels in London, and a strike on English synagogues’.

  The report noted that Mir referred to his UK lynchpin as ‘Dukan’, an Urdu word for ‘store’. But as British detectives prepared to raid Dukan’s home, he fled. ‘Lashkar looks as if it will break apart or metamorphose into an Al Qaeda-style outfit that is trying its best to strike at US and British interests at home and abroad, with India particularly vulnerable,’ the White House was warned. Less than a year later, almost all of what had been predicted in the dossier came to the fore in Mumbai.

  One month after 26/11, David Headley’s father, Syed Saleem Gilani, died in Lahore. Headley was out of the country but Pakistan’s Prime Minister visited the Gilani family home to offer his condolences. Headley mentioned this in an email to his Al-Qaeda-supporting friend Pasha, who attended Gilani’s funeral. Dismissing subsequent reports that the Pakistani government and Headley were in league, Headley’s half-brother Danyal issued a statement, saying the PM had visited out of courtesy ‘because I was his PRO and also because my father was a renowned broadcaster’.

  In December 2008, there was a flurry of email correspondence between David Headley and Major Iqbal concerning the fallout in Pakistan from 26/11. Headley was worried that Sajid Mir and Pasha had both gone to ground, and he had learned that M2 (Faiza) and Chand Bhai were being questioned by the Pakistani authorities. After receiving a message that chacha Zaki was likely to buckle if arrested and rumours that Pasha had also been ‘picked up by [ISI] counter guys in Pindi’ he ceased most of his digital communications. Soon, however, he was distracted by a new plot, the so-called Mickey Mouse Project, a plan to attack the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which had published cartoons said to lampoon the Prophet Mohammed. Once again Headley was dispatched to conduct surveillance directed by Pasha and Major Iqbal, who both reappeared unscathed by Mumbai.

  Headley was finally arrested at O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, in October 2009, en route to Pakistan. Although the US State Department would claim Headley was snared as the result of electronic surveillance connected to the controversial Prism programme, he was arrested after a British intelligence tip-off. Earlier that year he had travelled to the UK to meet one of Sajid Mir’s jihadi sleepers, who lived in Derby. In January 2013 Headley was convicted for his role in the Mumbai attacks. But after making another deal with the authorities, he was only sentenced to thirty-five years in prison and was protected from extradition to India.

  Tahawwur Rana, his co-accused and former cadet college friend, was found not guilty of the Mumbai attacks. David Headley’s second wife, Shazia, and his four children still live in Chicago, while Faiza Outalha, his third wife, returned to Morocco. Washington has never formally admitted Headley’s role as a double agent, despite the overwhelming evidence, but family members told us they believed this to be true.

  Indian investigators filed an 11, 000-page charge sheet against Ajmal Kasab, who was found guilty of waging war and sentenced to death by the Suprem
e Court of India in August 2012. His plea for clemency was rejected by the Indian president on 5 November 2012 and, after he had made a formal request that his mother be informed, he was hanged at Yerwada Jail in Pune, at 7.30 a.m. on 21 November 2012, and his body buried inside the prison grounds.

  After the attacks, his family had received a hand-delivered letter, written by Ajmal before he had set out. ‘Venerable parents! Today, Inshallah, I leave for Occupied Kashmir in order to fulfil my duty. The groans and cries of the Muslim brothers and sisters cry out to me . . . Life and death are in Allah’s hands, but no death is comparable to death that occurs on the battlefield.’

  The remains of his nine co-attackers remained in the JJ Hospital morgue until January 2010, when they were buried at a secret location. None of the ten bodies were claimed. As Kasab feared, none of them were going home.

  Both Headley and Kasab (as well as the captured Indian mujahid Abu Hamza) claimed that Sajid Mir was Brother Wasi, one of the handlers in the Karachi control room, overheard by the ATS. In 2011, Mir, who had used the pseudonym ‘Wasi’ in some of his email correspondence with Headley, was indicted in absentia by a US district attorney for conspiracy to murder in Mumbai, where six US citizens were killed. He remains at large.

  Lashkar’s amir, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, was arrested by the FIA in February 2009, along with Abu Al-Qama, one of the Karachi handlers, and Zarrar Shah, Lashkar’s media organizer and resident computer expert. Zaki is awaiting trial in Adiala Prison in Rawalpindi, where he is living well, allowed the use of a mobile phone and full conjugal rights with his wife, who recently gave birth. After 26/11, the ISI’s chief, Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha, visited him in jail, but vehemently denied any state involvement in the Mumbai attacks. Interestingly, the pseudonym Wasi was the nom de guerre chosen by chacha Zaki’s son, Mohammed Qasim, who died in battle in Kashmir in 2007. Abu Hamza, the Indian fidayeen trainer who taught the attackers Hindi, was extradited from Saudi Arabia to India in 2012, where he is awaiting trial.