Mumbai Attacks: Piecing Together the Story

AlterNet. Posted December 1, 2008.

There is a torrent of information and analysis on the recent attacks in Mumbai, but much of the story is nowhere to be seen in the American mainstream media. Here's a guide to what you might have missed:

What happened? 

Saikat Datta of Outlook India writes that by mid-September, Indian agencies knew that the attack would come from the sea, and by mid-November they knew that the Taj hotel would be targeted. And yet the attacks still happened. A blow-by-blow account of how the plan to attack Mumbai by sea was hatched and executed.

"Armed police would not fire back -- I wish I'd had a gun, not a camera." Jerome Taylor talked to the photographer whose picture of one of the attackers went around the world for the Independent. "Sebastian D'Souza, a picture editor at the Mumbai Mirror, whose offices are just opposite the city's Chhatrapati Shivaji station, heard the gunfire erupt and ran towards the terminus. 'I ran into the first carriage of one of the trains on the platform to try and get a shot but couldn't get a good angle, so I moved to the second carriage and waited for the gunmen to walk by,' he said. 'They were shooting from waist height and fired at anything that moved. I briefly had time to take a couple of frames using a telephoto lens. I think they saw me taking photographs but they didn't seem to care.' "

There is a first-person account by KG Prasad, a technical worker who was among the survivors in the Taj Mahal Hotel attacks -- He writes in the Indian Weekly, Tehelka, "I haven't slept in the last four days, and I haven't been able to enjoy a good meal either. Nothing has been possible. I was stuck there for just eight hours. Imagine those who were in there for 48 hours. I'm trying to think of this as an incident that has made me braver." Rachel Williams from the The Guardian also collected a series of short first-person accounts of the attacks.

Who Was Behind the Attacks?

-- In the U.K. Comment Is Free, William Dalrymple argues that "the links between the Mumbai attacks and the separatist struggle in Kashmir have become ever more explicit. There now seems to be a growing consensus that the operation is linked to the Pakistan-based jihadi outfit, Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader, Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed, operates openly from his base at Muridhke outside Lahore. This probable Pakistani origin of the Mumbai attacks, and the links to Kashmir-focused jihadi groups, means that the horrific events have to be seen in the context of the wider disaster of Western policy in the region since 9/11. The abject failure of the Bush administration to woo the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan away from the Islamists and, instead, managing to convince many of them of the hostility of the West towards all Muslim aspirations, has now led to a gathering catastrophe in Afghanistan, where the once-hated Taliban are now again at the gates of Kabul."

Saurabh Shukla of India Today offers an alternative scenario to Dalrymple, reporting that while the actual attack may have been carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, sources say the planning and financing could have been done by a lethal cocktail of terror group led by al-Qaida.

Yoichi Shimatsu of New America Media suggests that the Mumbai attacks carry the signature of Dawood Ibrahim, a multimillionaire owner of a construction company in Karachi, Pakistan. Although well known in South Asia, his is hardly a household name around the world like Osama bin Laden. Shobhita Naithani of Tehelka interviewed a former joint director of the India Intelligence Bureau, Maloy Krishna Dhar, who echoes Shimatsu: "I'm definite that without the help of Dawood Ibrahim, this would not have been possible. [The attackers] couldn't have known such details about the hotels."

Sandip Roy of New America Media argues that the gun-toting, Versace T-shirt-wearing assailant whose image was beamed across the world at the start of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai could as easily have been one of the victims as one of the terrorists.

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