Mumbai: Police on Thursday arrested a man named Ismail, an alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terrorist, in connection with a series of attacks across Mumbai’s busiest and most opulent areas over the last two days.
Even as at least 20 heavily-armed terrorists are believed to be carrying out the attacks, the country's intelligence apparatus is exploring all possible leads into the case.
Armed with RDX, M6 guns and grenades, terrorists reportedly took the sea route to enter Mumbai. Home Ministry sources claimed that the terrorists reached the Indian waters just 12 nautical miles from Mumbai.
Interrogation of the four alleged terrorists, who were captured by the National Security Guards (NSG) and Marine Commandos on Thursday, revealed the same information as the Home Ministry sources.
Amir Raza Kamal — one of the suspected terrorists — allegedly disclosed that they clambered into smaller boats before touching Mumbai shores at Sassoon Docks, following which they spread across Southern Bombay in pairs.
“They (terrorists) came and docked. They set up control rooms at the Taj and the Trident hotel and managed the entire operation in this manner. So obviously it was planned over months. They have sophisticated weapons with them,” Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said.
Amongst various al-Qaeda affiliated terror groups, the LeT is the only one trained to carry out maritime terrorism.
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Indian intelligence and security establishments say LeT has been developing its marine terror operational skills off the coast of Karachi in Pakistan.
The training includes sabotage of oil rigs, oil platforms, ports, harbours and other installations along the coast. The terrorists are also trained to mount sea-borne terror attacks on high-value assets on the coast, like the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), India’s premier nuclear research facilities.
Security has therefore been overhauled for these coastal assets. Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh earlier confirmed to CNN-IBN that 26 terrorists landed in the city via the sea route.
The Coast Guard found an abandoned trawler, carrying the beheaded body of a person, five km off the Mumbai coast. The boat is suspected to have brought the terrorists to Mumbai.
The police found satellite phones and some cell phones on the boat. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the US has dispatched a team to Mumbai.
Earlier this year in an interview, India’s National Security Advisor M K Narayanan had disclosed the threat perception to CNN-IBN.
“There was a team that had come once to India to do a reconnaissance, but the programme they had never worked out. But what is the LeT? The LeT is an integral part of al-Qaeda. So in a sense, you can say that the al-Qaeda is already present in India,” Narayanan had said.
The Indian Government is fairly convinced that the Mumbai terror attacks were carried out by the LeT.
In fact, the Jammu and Kashmir police discovered that the LeT was using the sea route to infiltrate into India, when the state Special Task Force (STF) arrested two LeT terrorists in the Jammu region last year.
Interrogation reports exclusively possessed by CNN-IBN show that the terrorist had entered India through the unguarded and porous western coast.
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