Mumbai Attackers Barely Escaped Encounter With Indian Navy/Coast Guard

I found this article pretty fascinating as it details just how close the Mumbai islamist jihadists came to having their boat boarded for inspection just prior to them launching their rubber rafts to land on Indian soil. In a nutshell, an Indian naval or coast guard vessel spotted the boat the terrorists were on and one sailor even used binoculars to glass the occupants - apparently the fact that the boat was Indian-owned swayed the naval boat from going any further. That, of course, was unfortunate but the one bit of silver lining here was that the encounter rattled the young terrorists so much that they forgot one of their key training mantras - to destroy their satellite phone and GPS. Of course, a huge part of India's smoking gun against the roots of the operation being in Pakistan is due to the recovery of those items from the boat. Here's some of the details at Times of India:

Alertness by an Indian patrol vessel on the night of November 26 could have prevented the Mumbai carnage. Lashkar terrorist Ajmal Amir Kasav has told interrogators that just before the 10 jihadis abandoned the trawler 'Kuber' to take inflatable boats to dock at Mumbai, an Indian vessel - either from the Navy or the Coast Guard and seemingly on a routine patrol - passed by Kuber with a sailor scanning it through binoculars.

The scrutiny was close enough to cause the terrorists to take positions and alert their Lashkar bosses. The Lashkar commanders ordered the gang to stay still and avoid a confrontation with the patrol. Soon, the vessel, perhaps taken in by the Indian ownership of Kuber, moved on. But in their haste to move out, the panicky jihadis forgot to destroy their satphone and GPS device. This was an instruction that had been sternly drilled into the group by the Lashkar trainers in the camps where they were trained, in the safehouse at Azizabad near Karachi where they had been put up before being sent and, one last time, on board Al Hussaini, the Lashkar ship which they sailed on before capturing Kuber.

One other thing that I have found interesting about the aftermath of the Mumbai attack is that the culprits, Lashkar-e-Taiba, denied their role in the attack right after it happened and of course, we see now a lot of the actions they had planned out to cover their tracks. Compare this to the terrorist attacks in the Middle East where once an attack is carried out, it's usually a dogpile of several terror organizations to claim responsibility. And look at al Qaeda who normally boasts of their involvement in a major attack, to the point where they will release a press statement.

I think the difference in this case comes down to two possibilities - one, that there was an element of this attack that was set up to get the Indians to suspect Pakistani intelligence (ISI) devised the plan and thus creating a war between India and Pakistan...while the second possibility, in my view, is that the leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba are too well known in Pakistan and their whereabouts could not be hidden easily.

Whichever it was, the smoking gun was found and Pakistan finds itself in a tough spot on how they are going to be perceived in handling the perpetrators. I would guess that when all the dust settles here, Pakistan will have no choice but to hand over some of the arrested to India in exchange for covering up some of their own government's involvement in the attack.

Terror boat was almost nabbed off Mumbai

This was an instruction that had been sternly drilled into the group by the Lashkar trainers in the camps where they were trained, in the safehouse at Azizabad near Karachi where they had been put up before being sent and, one last time, on board Al Hussaini, the Lashkar ship which they sailed on before capturing Kuber. The satellite phone, with five logged calls to Lashkar brass, is a trove of information that can blast apart Pakistan's denial that the terrorists were launched from its territory and by a group which is an extension of its espionage agency, the ISI. India's agencies have been familiar with one of these logged numbers which has regularly popped up in the course of investigation into terrorist attacks. It belongs to Abu Al Qama, a known Lashkar mastermind of jihadi violence. What should worry Lashkar and its mentors in Pakistan establishment is the GPS device in the Thuraya satellite phone - something that can pinpoint the location of the user. Such details are stored in the 'switch' or service provider's hub in Sharjah, and can drill holes in Lashkar's denials of its involvement. Put shortly, the satphone memory can map the location and movement of the instruments and their jihadi users. The Sharjah-based Thuraya has been the jihadis' favourite because the satphone is not licenced to be sold here and, therefore, the calls, made or received, cannot be intercepted. For the details of other four logged numbers, cops have approached the Federal Bureau of Investigation who have enough leverage with the UAE authorities to get the details from the service provider. The GPS device that they used on the trawler has already established that they had set out from Kazghar creek to be picked up by the jihadi ship, Al Hussaini. Indian cops are also depending on the FBI to trace the origin of calls made to mobile phones carried by the attackers through the Net, using Voice over Internet Protocol. This is going to be a tough task as the software to mask a user's location is freely available. Such calls pass through several proxy sites and the pathways are not easy to trace. FBI, however, has proven expertise in the field and Indian cops are banking on it. "It is a test case for the US's promise to help us get to the bottom of mass murder conspiracy," said a senior intelligence source, obviously wary of the extent to which Washington would go in a probe that can affect its ties with Pakistan, its ally in the "war against terror".