Mumbai attacked - India's 9/11

This was not terror – not as Indians understood it, anyway. This was war.

The killers stormed the streets of Mumbai, India's financial capital, with machine guns and bags of grenades. They did not strike with the terrorist's fleeting anonymity. Their work was fastidious.

As a surprise attack became a days-long struggle, the burden of responding transferred from the police to soldiers. The language was of war: television anchors spoke of buildings "sanitized" and "flushed out," of "final assaults" and "collateral damage."

Helicopters hovered over Mumbai, and commandos dropped onto roofs. The grainy television imagery suggested not so much a terrorist attack as the chaos of Iraq.

In the end, nearly 200 people were killed. And contrary to earlier reports, it appeared that Westerners were not the gunmen's main targets: They killed whomever they could.

By Saturday evening, 18 of the dead were confirmed as foreigners, including six Americans. An additional 22 foreigners were injured, said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra state, where Mumbai is.

There were reports on the first night of the attacks that gunmen rounded up holders of American and British passports at the Oberoi Hotel and herded them upstairs. But Rattan Keswani, president of the affiliated Trident Hotels, said he had found no basis for such reports.
"Nothing seems to suggest that," he said, noting that a range of nationalities was represented among the 22 hotel guests who died, in addition to the 10 staff members, all Indian.

The city's police chief, Hasan Gafoor, said nine gunmen were killed. A 10th suspected terrorist was arrested.

The police said he was a 21-year-old Pakistani, Ajmal Amir Kasab.

A senior Mumbai police inspector, Nagappa R. Mali, said the suspect and one of his collaborators, who was slain by police, killed three top police officials, including the head of the anti-terrorist squad, Hemant Karkare.

Around dawn Saturday, gunfire began to rattle inside the Taj Mahal hotel, one of about a dozen sites that the militants attacked beginning Wednesday night. They never issued any manifestoes or made any demands, and it seemed clear from their resistance at the Taj that they intended to fight to the last.

By midmorning Saturday, after commandos had worked their way through the 565-room hotel, the head of the elite National Security Guards, J.K. Dutt, said the siege was over.

By afternoon, busloads of elite commandos, fresh from the siege of the hotel, sat outside the nearby Gateway of India and shook hands with elated spectators.

The violence was unlike the many recent strikes in India – those were typically bombs left in thronging markets or trains or cars. The Mumbai attackers seemed to prolong the fight as long as they could. They killed face to face.

In television studios, on the roads, in the anguished phone calls of friends to friends, Indians said the words again and again: This is our 9/11.

"It is an Indian variant of 9/11, and today India needs to respond the way America did," Ravi Shankar Prasad, a member of Parliament from the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party, said on television.

People purporting to be the attackers have said they belong to a group called the Deccan Mujahedeen, and claimed to be waging a war in Islam's name. It was uncertain whether they are of domestic or foreign origin.

Islamist militants in India have in recent years operated somewhat apart from the global Islamist struggle. They bombed and killed, but their enemies generally were Indian Hindus.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the attacks "probably" had a foreign hand. His temperateness helped to keep the ever-present threat of religious riots at bay.

Amartya Sen, a Harvard economist and Indian-born Nobel laureate, wrote in an e-mail message: "It is extremely important to understand that the criminal activities of a minuscule group, even if it turns out to have homegrown elements, say nothing about Indian Muslims in general, who are an integral part of the country's social fabric.

"Even if it turns out that the Mumbai terrorists had a base in Pakistani territory, India has to take full note of the fact that the bulk of Pakistani civil society is an ally, not an enemy, in the battle against Islamist terrorism, for they too suffer greatly from the violence of a determined minority based in their country."