The lone gunman to survive the Mumbai terror attacks was a petty street thug from a dusty Pakistani outpost who was systematically programmed into a highly trained suicide guerrilla over 18 months in jihadist camps, India’s top investigator into the attacks said.
Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 21, was one of the 10 men who came ashore on a small rubber raft on Nov. 26, divided into five pairs and attacked some of Mumbai’s best known and most beloved landmarks.
Kasab and his partner rampaged through the city’s main train terminal, then shot up a police station and a hospital, carjacked a police van — killing the city’s counterterrorism chief and four other police inside — and stole a second car.
PHOTO: AFP
They finally were brought to a halt in a shootout that killed Kasab’s partner and left Kasab with bullet wounds in both hands and a minor wound in his neck, said Rakesh Maria, the chief police investigator on the case.
Photographs of Kasab walking calmly through the train station with his assault rifle made him a symbol of the attacks.
In the days since Kasab’s capture, police have repeatedly interrogated him about his background, his training and the details of the attack. Maria declined to divulge the interrogation methods, saying only that Kasab was “fairly forthcoming.”
Kasab said he was one of five children of Mohammed Amir Kasab, a poor street food vendor in the Pakistani town of Farid Kot, Maria said.
But residents of the impoverished town of 7,000 people, 140km south of the Pakistani city of Lahore, said they had never heard of Kasab or his father.
Mayor Ghulam Mustafa said police and investigators from Pakistan’s spy agencies had also investigated the gunman’s link to the town and found nothing.
Maria said as a teenager, Kasab became a low-level thief, robbing people at knifepoint.
But he dreamed of starting his own gang, and began poking around Lahore, trying to buy guns. He was put in touch with a man who offered to send him for weapons training, and he readily agreed, Maria said.
Kasab soon found himself in a camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, Maria said. Lashkar, a banned Pakistani militant group, has alleged ties to Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agencies.
Though he had always been a religious Muslim, Kasab had never ascribed to the violent ideology of some extremist groups, Maria said.
That quickly changed in the camp.
“The moment he came under their wings, the indoctrination started. And that’s when he decided there should be some meaning to his life and jihad [holy war] was his calling,” he said.
For 18 months, Kasab was put through a multiphase training program at different camps in Pakistan. It started with physical fitness and jihadi indoctrination, proceeded to small arms lessons, moved on to explosives training and eventually to classes in handling assault rifles, Maria said. He was also trained in how to navigate a boat.
The training was done in the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, Muzaffarabad, and the mountain town of Mansehra, in Pakistan’s deeply conservative North-West Frontier Province, which was a center of training for Kashmiri militants before Pakistan began its peace process with India. Some was also done in Murdike, the base of the Islamist charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which has been accused by the US of being the front group for Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Three months before the attack, Kasab, along with nine other men he had never met, were put in isolation in a house in Pakistan and trained for the assault on Mumbai by three or four operatives, Maria said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not