Q+A - Who could be behind the Mumbai attacks and why?

Subject: Q+A - Who could be behind the Mumbai attacks and why? 2008-11-29, 12:14

Militants armed with automatic weapons and grenades attacked luxury hotels, hospitals and a famous tourist cafe in India's commercial capital Mumbai late on Wednesday, killing at least 101 people.

* WHO IS BEHIND THE ATTACKS?
The attacks were claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen in an e-mail to news organisations. Deccan is an area of southern India.
But it is not clear if the claim is genuine, and analysts say the bombings are almost certainly the work of a different group.
The most likely perpetrators, they say, are either the Indian Mujahideen or Lashkar-e-Taiba.

* WHO ARE LASHKAR-E-TAIBA?
Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the largest Islamic militant groups in South Asia, based in Pakistan and fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. Security analysts say it is a well-funded and highly organised group that sympathises with al Qaeda.
Lashkar-e-Taiba denied being behind the Mumbai attacks and said it condemned them.
The group was blamed for bomb attacks on markets in New Delhi that killed more than 60 people in 2005, as well as an assault on India's parliament in 2001 that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a fourth war.

* WHO ARE THE INDIAN MUJAHIDEEN?
Indian police say the Indian Mujahideen is an offshoot of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), but that local Muslims appear to have been given training and backing from militant groups in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh.
SIMI has been blamed by police for almost every major bomb attack in India, including explosions on commuter trains in Mumbai two years ago that killed 187 people.
Police said the Indian Mujahideen may also include former members of Bangladeshi militant group Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami.
The group first emerged during a wave of bombings in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in November 2007, sending an e-mail to media outlets just before some of the bombs exploded.
They have since claimed responsibility for multiple bomb attacks in Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi.

* WHO DOES INDIA BLAME?
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the attacks were probably plotted by a group based in a neighbouring country.
But Indian governments often blame neighbouring Pakistan or sometimes Bangladesh for supporting or harbouring militant groups which have launched attacks on Indian soil.

* WHAT CAN BE INFERRED FROM THE ATTACKERS' TACTICS?
The Mumbai attacks were unusual in that they involved coordinated attacks by gunmen on multiple targets, hostages were taken, and foreigners were specifically targeted.
Several analysts say these tactics point to Lashkar-e-Taiba as being involved. The attacks on symbolic targets designed to gather maximum publicity, and the specific targeting, point to a group following al Qaeda ideology and tactics.
The attacks also show a considerable degree of sophistication, another factor pointing to an experienced group like Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The Indian Mujahideen have also surprised police with the sophistication of their attacks, however, although until now these have always been bomb attacks on Indian targets.
In May, the Indian Mujahideen made a specific threat to attack tourist sites in India unless the government stopped supporting the United States in the international arena.
The threat was made in an e-mail claiming responsibility for bomb attacks that killed 63 people in the tourist city of Jaipur. The mail declared "open war against India" and included the serial number of a bicycle used in one of the bombings.

* WHAT CAN BE INFERRED FROM THEIR DEMANDS?
A man speaking Urdu with a Kashmiri accent phoned an Indian TV station, offering talks with the government and accusing the Indian army of killing Muslims in Kashmir. This suggests the attackers are involved with a Kashmiri group like Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The demands of the Indian Mujahideen -- like their targets -- have always tended to be much more domestic. The group issued an e-mail threat in September to attack Mumbai but directed its anger at the Mumbai police anti-terrorist squad, accusing them of harassing Muslims.
"If this is the degree your arrogance has reached, and if you think that by these stunts you can scare us, then let the Indian Mujahideen warn all the people of Mumbai that whatever deadly attacks Mumbaikars will face in future, their responsibility would lie with the Mumbai ATS and their guardians," it said.

AP – A man with his face covered, identified by the police as Mukhtar Ahmed, appears at a court in Calcutta, …

SRINAGAR, India – One of the two Indian men arrested for illegally buying mobile phone cards used by the gunmen in the Mumbai attacks was a counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission, security officials said Saturday, demanding his release.
The arrests, announced in the eastern city of Calcutta, were the first since the bloody siege ended. But what was touted as a rare success for India's beleaguered law enforcement agencies, quickly turned sour as police in two Indian regions squared off against one another.
Senior police officers in Indian Kashmir, which has been at the heart of tensions between India and Pakistan, demanded the release of the officer, Mukhtar Ahmed, saying he was one of their own and had been involved in infiltrating Kashmiri militant groups.
Indian authorities believe the banned Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has links to Kashmir, trained the gunmen and plotted the attacks that left 171 people dead after a three-day rampage through Mumbai that began Nov. 26.
The implications of Ahmed's involvement — that Indian agents may have been in touch with the militants and perhaps supplied the SIM cards used in the attacks — added to the growing list of questions over India's ill-trained security forces, which are widely blamed for not thwarting the attacks.
Earlier Saturday, Calcutta police announced the arrests of Ahmed and Tauseef Rahman, who allegedly bought SIM cards by using fake documents, including identification cards of dead people. The cards allow users switch their cellular service to phones other than their own.
Rahman, of West Bengal state, later sold them to Ahmed, said Rajeev Kumar a senior Calcutta police officer.
Both men were arrested Friday and charged with fraud and criminal conspiracy, Kumar said, adding that police were still investigating how the 10 gunmen obtained the SIM cards.
But the announcement had police in Srinagar, the main city in Indian-controlled Kashmir, fuming.
We have told Calcutta police that Ahmed is "our man and it's now up to them how to facilitate his release," said one senior officer speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information. Other police officials in Kashmir supported his account.
The officer said Ahmed was a Special Police Officer, part of a semiofficial counterinsurgency network whose members are usually drawn from former militants. The force is run on a special funding from the federal Ministry of Home Affairs.
"Sometimes we use our men engaged in counterinsurgency ops to provide SIM cards to the (militant) outfits so that we track their plans down," said the officer.
Police said Ahmed was recruited to the force after his brother was killed five years ago, allegedly by Lashkar-e-Taiba militants for being a police informer.
About a dozen Islamic militant groups have been fighting in Kashmir since 1989, seeking independence from mainly Hindu India or a union with Muslim-majority Pakistan.
India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over the Himalayan region, which is divided between them and claimed by both in its entirety.
The Calcutta police denied the claims from Srinagar. "This is not true," said Kumar.
The bungling and miscommunications among India's many security services comes as police said they were re-examining another suspected Lashkar militant who was arrested nine months before the attacks carrying hand-drawn sketches of Mumbai hotels, the train terminal and other targeted sites.

Rakesh Maria, a senior Mumbai police officer, said the man, Faheem Ansari, was being transported to Mumbai from northern India where he has been in custody for further questioning, hoping he could shed more light on the attacks.

Maria said there was a definite connection between Ansari and the Mumbai attacks. "Ansari was trained by Lashkar and sent to do reconnaissance," he said.

And a day after India's top law enforcement official apologized for security "lapses" that allowed the gunmen to rampage through Mumbai, there were new embarrassments — this time with holes in the prime minister's security.

Police preparing for a visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh near Calcutta hired high-school children for the equivalent of $2.50 each to sit in trees for the day and look out for suspicious people.

Local police chief L.N. Meena defended using children in the prime minister's security detail, saying there were too many trees in the area and not enough policemen.

"The area is full of trees, so to check them to see if there were any anti-social elements or anyone making mischief, we employed the youths," he said.

Television footage showed dozens of the youngsters perched in trees, with yellow paper badges that read "security pass" pinned on their chests.

Meanwhile police continued the interrogation of the lone surviving gunman from the Mumbai attacks, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 21, who revealed that the gunmen had detailed pictures of the locations, Maria said.

"They were pretty elaborate photographs," he said, adding that they had also used maps from Google to study the targets.

Kasab has told interrogators he had been sent by Lashkar and identified two of the plot's masterminds as being involved, two Indian government officials familiar with the inquiry said. Police had earlier identified the prisoner as Ajmal Amir Kasab.

Lashkar changed its name to Jamaat-ud-Dawa after it was banned in 2002 amid U.S. pressure, according to the U.S. State Department. The U.S. lists both groups as terrorist organizations.

Kasab told police that a senior Lashkar leader, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the group's operations chief, recruited him for the attack, and that the assailants called another senior leader, Yusuf Muzammil, on a satellite phone before the attacks.

In Pakistan, the Interior Ministry chief told reporters he had no immediate information on Lakhvi or Muzammil.

According to the U.S., Lakhvi has directed Lashkar operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and Southeast Asia, training members to carry out suicide bombings and attack populated areas. In 2004, he allegedly sent operatives and funds to attack U.S. forces in Iraq.
____

[/size]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081206/ap_on_re_as/as_india_shooting

» Mumbai meri jaan
» Terror attacks in Mumbai; 10 dead, several injured
» Akram attacks Hayden for his comments about India
» ~~PAKI IN MUMBAI~~
» 26/11 - Mumbai terror