News Round-Up: Mumbai Siege Ends; Intelligence Forces Attempt to Determine Its Origins

by Damozel | BBC News says that at least 195 are dead.  Troops are now searching the Taj Mahal Hotel, checking for casualties. As BBC News points out, there have been a number of terrorist incidents in India during 2008.  A list is here.

According to The Times of London, India has laid the blame on Pakistan; and one official has said that two of the militants were British Pakistanis.  Gordon Brown says there is no evidence to confirm this.(ToL)  However:

A Conservative MP said he had been given information that at least two of the terrorists had credit cards and other documents that linked them to Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Patrick Mercer also said he had been told that the gunmen were using seized mobile phones and BlackBerries to access British news sites online.(ToL)

Pakistan has angrily denied the charge that the attack was the work of "elements" from Pakistan.

“Preliminary evidence indicates that elements with links to Pakistan are involved,” Pranab Mukherjee, the Foreign Minister, said. Pakistan rejected the suggestion and agreed to send its intelligence chief to India to share information.

The attacks bore the hallmarks of Pakistan-based militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed, which were blamed for an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001. (ToL)

According to The Guardian, Islamabad has now "backtracked" on its "promise to send to India the chief of its spy service, Inter-Services Intelligence."   The government of Pakistan has condemned the attacks.

The Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, has condemned the attacks and his country's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, promised full cooperation, telling reporters in New Delhi: "We are not responsible for this, nor is it in our interest to get involved in something like this."

The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, warned of "a cost" if Pakistan did not act to stop its territory being used as a launchpad for Islamist militant attacks.(Guardian)

The same report says an army general thinks the attackers were, or included, army regulars. 

They appeared to be well trained and "very, very familiar" with the layout of the hotel, an army general said.

"At times we found them matching us in combat and movement. They were either army regulars or have done a long stint of commando training," a commando told the Hindustan Times.(Guardian)

The New York Times further reports: 

Indian commandos said the attackers at both hotels appeared well trained in handling weapons and hand grenades, and they seemed to know the buildings’ layouts, indicating a high degree of preparation. Some were seen arriving by boat; others may have been registered guests at the hotels for days.

“AK-47s and hand grenades, how to use and deploy them, this is not something you just pick up,” said Bruce Hoffmann, a professor at Georgetown University and the author of “Inside Terrorism.”

“Soldiers spend months learning how to do these things. You can’t learn this over the Internet.”

The leader of a commando unit involved in a gun battle inside the Taj said Friday that his team found a gunman’s backpack, which contained dried fruit, 400 rounds of AK-47 ammunition, four grenades, Indian and American money, and seven credit cards from some of the world’s leading banks, he said. The pack also had a national identity card from the island of Mauritius.

Meanwhile, US officials say there is "mounting evidence" that the Kashmir-based group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for the attacks, though as yet they've reached no firm conclusions, though the group has denied responsibility. (NYT)   If the attacks really were initiated from a group in Pakistan, "that would certainly further escalate tensions between India and Pakistan, bitter, nuclear-armed rivals. It could also provoke an Indian military response, even strikes against militants’ training camps." (NYT)  The Bush administration is trying to pour oil on the waters while the investigation goes forward.

A State Department report released this year called Lashkar-e-Taiba “one of the largest and most proficient of the Kashmiri-focused militant groups.” The report said that the group drew financing in part from Pakistani expatriates in the Middle East....

Recently, some of the group’s operations have shifted from Kashmir to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and even to Afghanistan to attack American troops. American officials and terrorism experts said the group had not sent large numbers of operatives into Afghanistan, but had embedded small teams with Taliban units to gain fighting experience.

“Afghanistan is an operating war zone, so they can get active training as the Kashmir front has slowed down a bit,” said Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation. (NYT) 

The group doesn't have a history of singling out westerners, but is allegedly "loosely affiliated" with Al Qaeda.  It seems that nobody believes that the attacks were initiated by the "Deccan Mujahedeen," which actually claimed responsibility but which no one has apparently ever heard of. 

It is now known that the attackers murdered five hostages at a Jewish house of prayer.  The New York Times reports:

Leaders of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Brooklyn and the worldwide ultra-orthodox Jewish community began on Friday to mourn the deaths of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, who were killed in the terrorist attack of the Nariman House, the Jewish outreach center in Mumbai that the young couple had left New York to manage in 2003.

Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, who leads the group’s missionaries, condemned “the brutal murder of our finest.... Words are inadequate to express our outrage and deep pain at this tragic act of cold-blooded murder.”

The couple’s son Moshe, who turns 2 on Saturday, was rescued from the attack by the family’s nanny....

It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene. In a news conference broadcast Friday on Israeli radio, Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister said: “We know that the targets there that were sought out by the terrorists were Jewish and Israeli targets as well as targets that are perceived as Western targets — American and British.”

She added: “We need to understand that there’s a world here, our world, that has been attacked. And it doesn’t matter if it’s happened in India or somewhere else. We have here radical Islamic elements who do not accept either our existence or the values of the Western world. And only when incidents of this sort occur is it suddenly understood from conversations with leaders from around the entire world that we are actually party to the same battle.”

The Indian government says that nine of the attackers have been killed. (NYT)  One has been captured.  The police are still finding bodies, it seems.

The terrorists never issued any manifestoes or made any demands, and it seemed clear from their stubborn resistance at the Taj that they intended to fight to the last...Mr. Gafoor, the police commissioner, said security forces were still combing through the hotel on Saturday afternoon and it was expected that they would find more bodies. One commando leader said earlier that his team had come across a single room in the Taj containing a dozen corpses or more.(NYT)

According to Mike Atherton at  The Times of London, the staff of the Taj Mahal hotel--known for its "sublime service"--- behaved heroically and many guests owe their lives to this courage.

They were heroes in cummerbunds and overalls. The staff of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel saved hundreds of wealthy guests as heavily armed gunmen roamed the building, firing indiscriminately, leaving a trail of corpses behind them.

Among the workers there were some whose bravery and sense of duty led them to sacrifice their own lives, witnesses said.

Prashant Mangeshikar, a guest, said that a hotel worker, identified only as Mr Rajan, had put himself between one of the gunmen and Mr Mangeshikar, his wife and two daughters.

“The man in front of my wife shielded us,” Mr Mangeshikar said. “He was a maintenance section staff member. He took the bullets.” For the next 12 hours, before Mr Rajan was finally taken out of the hotel, guests battled to stop the bleeding from a gaping bullet wound in his abdomen. It is not known if he lived.

There are other stories of their heroism here. 

On the other hand, security expert Larry Johnson notes that some witnesses reported that there were hotel staffers who joined in the attack.  Did renegades in the Pakistani Intelligence Service orchestrate the attacks?

While it is possible that a group of Islamic extremists like the Lashkar banded together on their own to infiltrate personnel into these hotels, this smacks more of an organized intelligence organization. Getting your intelligence assets into an upscale hotel where they can report on the comings, goings, and doings of prominent business and political leaders is a coup. It is not the kind of thing that any Al Qaeda affiliated group has shown it can do.

As Johnson underscores, the government of Pakistan is not at all sympathetic to rogue agents within its intelligence forces.  "To the contrary, the impetus for this attack may have been the move by President Zardari to disband the ISI. If anything it is a reminder Zardari is not in a strong position and his grasp on power is both tenuous and fragile." We need to hope that US policy-makers will reach out to those Pakistanis in government who are moderate and non-Sectarian. Johnson points out the stakes for the US.

The last thing we need now is to have Pakistan’s nuclear weapons fall under the control of radical Islamists. That is a fear, generally unspoken, that lurks in the back of the minds of U.S. officials wrestling with the complexities of Pakistan.

More on this here at Memeorandum.

RELATED BUCK NAKED POLITICS POSTINGS

Update/News Round-Up: Rising Death Toll in India; Commentators Questioning Links to Al Qaeda & Allegations that Attacks Were Aimed at Foreigners 

Indian Terror: Attackers Targeting Americans & Britons?

Terrorist Attacks in India: 80 Killed, 240 Wounded  (11-26)

Pakistan: U.S. Stops Ground Raids, Starts Airstrikes  (10-27)

After Islamabad Bombing, Pakistani President Pledges to End Terrorism  (9-21)

Comments

[Guy Smiley]

This is a no brainer Religious Terrorists=WHO?