After a 59-hour siege ended with the shooting dead of the last terrorists holed up in Nariman House Jewish centre, the country was united in shock and grief.
Source/Credit: The Telegraph
By Barney Henderson | April 12, 2013
The testimony of the only gunman captured alive after the Mumbai massacre in 2008 provided a unique insight into the mind of a terrorist. So what turned a boy from a farming village into a cold-blooded killer?
On the evening of November 26 2008 I was having a drink in one of Mumbai’s plethora of upmarket bars when I got a call from a journalist friend telling me there had been a bomb at Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station.
I sprinted out of the bar, caught a cab downtown and was one of the first reporters on the scene. It soon became clear the city was under attack. The Taj Mahal Palace and Trident-Oberoi hotels and a Jewish centre had been occupied by gunmen. A backpacker bar – which would have been the venue for our drinks had one of the group not been delayed – had been sprayed with bullets.
I spent that night and much of the following three days camped out at the various target sites as not only reporters but also police, the military and politicians tried to grasp what was happening. It was one of the most intricately planned terrorist attacks of recent years, which took New Delhi to the brink of war with Pakistan, and has become known as India’s 9/11. The attack had a significant impact on counter-terrorism strategies around the world, with security services put on high alert to the risk of 'Mumbai-style’ incursions on soft targets.
After a 59-hour siege ended with the shooting dead of the last terrorists holed up in Nariman House Jewish centre, the country was united in shock and grief. Ten young men had sailed from Pakistan armed with AK-47 assault rifles and carrying backpacks full of ammunition and attacked the city’s landmark sites with apparent ease, eventually killing 166 people, including 22 foreigners. The figurehead for the country’s collective hatred over 26/11, as it came to be called, was Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone surviving gunman.
Kasab was 21 when he strolled into the railway station carrying an AK-47 and indiscriminately shot at men, women and children. Grenades blew up those queuing for tickets in the snaking lines. Fifty-two people were killed and dozens more were injured as the vast ticket hall of the city’s busiest and most historic station – formerly called Victoria Terminus and inspired by St Pancras in London – was ruthlessly turned into a slaughterhouse.
Kasab, nicknamed the Butcher of Bombay (kasab means butcher in Urdu), was hanged last November, almost four years after the attack. His execution was welcomed by relations of the victims, the Indian authorities and the wider population as a chance to draw a line under the terror. Yet when I returned to Mumbai last year to conduct research for an MA in terrorism at King’s College London, it was clear that many questions remained about the life of Kasab. What had propelled him from a farming village in rural Pakistan via military-style boot camps run by the Islamic terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and on to murder in Mumbai? [ The making of a monster ... more ... ]
Read original post here: Mumbai terror attacks: the making of a monster
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