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?
Armed with an AK-47 assault rifle and hand grenades, Ajmal Amir Kasab walks
through Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station on November 26 2008
Armed with an AK-47 assault rifle and hand grenades, Ajmal Amir Kasab walks
through Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station on November 26 2008
Photo: AP
Barney Henderson
By Barney Henderson
9:00PM BST 12 Apr 2013
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.
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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?
An Indian soldier takes cover outside the Taj Mahal Palace hotel (AP)
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.
Ajmal Kasab shortly after his capture (AP)
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.’
Hafiz Saeed, the head of the Islamic terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba
(AP)
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’.
Rakesh Maria, the chief investigator of the 26/11 case (GETTY IMAGES)
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.
The Indian public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam speaks to reporters outside the
court after Kasab’s conviction (AP)
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!
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