In the history of terrorism, the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks were as innovative as the 9/11 attacks on the US. While passenger airplanes were used for the first time as weapons of destruction during 9/11, the Mumbai attacks saw an unprecedented feature of live operational control of terrorist acts from foreign soil.
Also significant during 26/11 was the terrorist handlers’ capability in utilising the target country’s free electronic media for further killing and live feedback. Competitive Indian visual media covering the Mumbai attacks beamed minute-to-minute details to the domestic audience which served as a barometer of the damage inflicted on the Indian psyche and resultant panic, the two vital aims of any terrorist group. It enabled the Pakistani handlers to calibrate attacks using the cell phones of ground-level terrorists.
Simultaneous attacks on targets totally confused an unprepared Mumbai police and public, much like the September 2001 attacks on Americans. The elaborate subterfuge which the handlers had planned in setting up their communications through Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) by utilising foreign cell phone numbers was yet another new feature.
This was perhaps the first time in major urban terrorism history that terrorists had engaged police teams in live combat at five locations. There was no live battle during 9/11. It was not there in the Madrid Railway bombing (March 11, 2004) which killed 191 or in London 7/7 (July 7, 2005) attacks, resulting in 52 deaths. In fact, the Mumbai 26/11 attacks became a template for the November 2015 Paris attacks with live combat on six targets, which killed 130.
Like the 9/11 attacks, the Mumbai attacks also spurred panic, especially in the US. that was because the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had prepared a Coastal Protection Scheme in April 2008 after recognising the presence of 17 million small boats around the US coastline and the fear that some of them could be used by al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts. Thus when 26/11 took place, it was seen as a dress rehearsal for a similar attack on the US as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) was closely aligned with al-Qaeda.
Well before India initiated any inquiry on the major terrorist attack on our soil, the US Senate Homeland Security Committee had held a hearing on the Mumbai 26/11 attack on January 9, 2009, to discuss how similar tactics would affect US security. One of the first persons to depose before the Committee was the then New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly who underlined the key features of 26/11. He said that the US counter terrorist agencies would need to rework their methodology on how panic could be curbed even in a free media ambience, how to disrupt terrorists’ communication network without adversely affecting the free milieu and how to re-deploy forces in the US since the 26/11 attacks had taken over 60 hours to terminate, a situation US had never experienced in urban areas. Stephen Tankel, a well-known expert on the LeT, said in 2018, that the Mumbai operation “began as a relatively small operation involving only one target and a few terrorists but expanded considerably during summer 2008”. One of the reasons why it mounted the 26/11 attack was “enhancing its Jehadi credibility”.
Whatever might have been the reason, it only resulted in humiliating India and its stature as a growing power. Edward N Luttwak, senior security specialist at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, wrote a scathing piece on December 5, 2008, in The Los Angeles Times ridiculing our police, intelligence organisations and paramilitary groups. The US think tank Rand highlighted the astonishing failures of our defence forces through their occasional paper ‘The lessons of Mumbai’, as the army columns came after five hours while the naval commandos (Marcos) came still later. It was only at 0850 hours the next day that the elite National Security Guards arrived.
The 26/11 High Level Committee, of which I was a member along with Chairman, the late Ram Pradhan, had expressed shock that the highest Home Department official and her deputy, a police officer, had given in writing on February 9, 2009, that they did not receive any prior alert from the central government. Surprisingly, the Director General of Police (DGP) and Commissioner of Police (CP) had given us copies of 26 alerts from August 2006 to September 2008, most of them addressed by designation to the same Home Department official.
The least the Home Department could have done to prevent 26/11 was to summon a joint meeting of the police, Navy, and Coast Guards for effective coastal protection in view of their statutory responsibility under Section 4 of the amended Bombay Police Act, where the “superintendence of the police force” is with the State Home Department. In our report, we observed that this official “must ultimately take responsibility for all work relating to the department”.
When we examined the 26 secret alerts, we found that there was adequate prior information available with stakeholders except the exact date. Of these, six were on the possibility of “sea borne attacks”, 12 on the likelihood of simultaneous assaults on multiple targets and three on the likely “fedayeen” offensives.
We made nearly 27 recommendations on intelligence processing and communication as well as speedier intervention by creating smaller units at strategic locations. Another recommendation was to study “Open-Source Intelligence” (OSI) which, if dovetailed with secret intelligence, would have enabled the establishment of an effective preventive architecture.
There were two TV broadcasts, on July 30, 2006, and June 16, 2007, which if read together with secret intelligence alerts, could have given a picture of the looming calamity. One had said that there was no police presence anywhere on the Mumbai coastline despite a warning on attacks on our nuclear installations. The second was that some terrorists with bogus Hindu ID cards who had arrived by sea route near Mumbai were apprehended in Jammu and Kashmir.
Also, similar attacks had happened on the Serena Hotel in Kabul on January 14, 2008, killing six and on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on September 20, 2008, which killed 54.
The writer, a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, was a member of the two-man High Level Committee appointed by the Maharashtra Government to probe police handling of the 26/11 attacks. Views are personal
Simultaneous attacks on targets totally confused an unprepared Mumbai police and public
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27.11.2023
In the history of terrorism, the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks were as innovative as the 9/11 attacks on the US. While passenger airplanes were used for the first time as weapons of destruction during 9/11, the Mumbai attacks saw an unprecedented feature of live operational control of terrorist acts from foreign soil.
Also significant during 26/11 was the terrorist handlers’ capability in utilising the target country’s free electronic media for further killing and live feedback. Competitive Indian visual media covering the Mumbai attacks beamed minute-to-minute details to the domestic audience which served as a barometer of the damage inflicted on the Indian psyche and resultant panic, the two vital aims of any terrorist group. It enabled the Pakistani handlers to calibrate attacks using the cell phones of ground-level terrorists.
Simultaneous attacks on targets totally confused an unprepared Mumbai police and public, much like the September 2001 attacks on Americans. The elaborate subterfuge which the handlers had planned in setting up their communications through Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) by utilising foreign cell phone numbers was yet another new feature.
This was perhaps the first time in major urban terrorism history that terrorists had engaged police teams in live combat at five locations. There was no live battle during 9/11. It was not there in the Madrid Railway bombing (March 11, 2004) which killed 191 or in London 7/7 (July 7, 2005) attacks, resulting in 52 deaths. In fact, the Mumbai 26/11 attacks became a template for the November 2015 Paris attacks........
© Indian Express
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