Mumbai Terror Aftermath – Part I

By Anosh Malekar, Commodity Online
It is beyond anybody’s doubt now that the terror that visited India’s financial capital last week arrived by sea, from the Pakistan port city of Karachi. The heavily armed young men apparently captured an Indian fishing vessel mid-sea and navigated their way within a few nautical miles of Mumbai.

Local fishermen mistook them for a bunch of smart young backpackers on some kind of an adventure in a rubber dinghy and were curious to know more, but were told to mind their business.

“Why are you bothered? Mind your own business,” said one of the young men on being questioned by a fisherwoman about what the group was up to. The woman and a few young boys from a little known fishing locality at Cuffe Parade chose to leave it at that, late evening on that fateful Wednesday.

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What followed were two days and three nights of bloody mayhem in south Mumbai, the most expensive address in India. The random killings started around 9.50 pm at Leopold Café, frequented by young westerners among others, and then spilt over to the crowded streets and lanes, reaching Cama Hospital and the imposing British-era CST, previously VT, a centrally located railway terminus teeming with ordinary commuters till late in the night.

The most audacious act of the armed men, though, was the siege of the iconic Taj, a 105 year-old heritage hotel owned by the Tatas, followed by Trident Oberoi, its more recent rival in the business of hosting the rich and famous from around the world. Amidst the mayhem, what missed even the journalistic eye initially was the specific targeting of Nariman House located in the labyrinthine lanes of Colaba, where an orthodox Jewish Rabbi lived with his family and played host to visiting members of the community from around the world.

At the end of the 60-hour ordeal, a nation and the world were shaken by the new kind of terror that came by the sea route. The 160-odd deaths and 300-odd injured list made international headlines, the attack widely described as India’s “9/11” or “26/11” with ramifications across the globe.

Sitting in Pune, a little over 150 kilometers south of Mumbai, my mind traveled to the west coast of the country, even as I watched the terror unravel on the television screen inside my drawing room. There were news reports indicating the small bunch of terrorists may have arrived by the sea route within 24 hours of the attack on Mumbai. Young boys from the fishing colonies along the Mumbai coast were the first to alert the media about the arrival of some suspicious looking, fair-skinned youth in a dinghy barely an hour or so before the mayhem began.

Then came reports of Indian navy and coast guards locating a vessel floating some five nautical miles of the Mumbai coast. It was identified as MV Kuber, a mechanized fishing trawler from Porbander in neighbouring Gujarat. The captain of the vessel, Amarsingh Solanki, was found lying dead in a pool of blood, his throat slit open and limbs tied with ropes. There was no sign of the other crew members, who may have been killed and thrown in the sea or taken hostages.

More details began to emerge as the Taj siege came to an end. The records register of the customs authorities at Porbander showed the vessel carrying creek pass no. ch/pbr/174 issued on August 16, 2008, and valid till December 31, 2008, had left the port on October 30. It returned back to Porbander for a brief halt on November 13 to offload catch and refuel. It was then lost to be found on November 27.The location of the vessel in this interim period is a mystery authorities are trying to solve. The seized GPS mapping and rough calculations of the average speed of the mechanized trawler tell it would require approximately three to four days for it to cover the 550-plus nautical miles from Karachi to Mumbai. So does this mean it was captured days in advance of the attack? Difficult to tell at this stage of investigations, say officials in Mumbai.

The other theory doing the rounds in the media is the group of 10 terrorists set out on their macabre mission on a Lashkar-e-Toiba owned ship and mid-way on the high seas switched to MV Kuber killing all its occupants except the skipper to get past Indian surveillance.

To get to Mumbai the attackers would have sailed parallel to the Gujarat coastal line across Porbander, Mangrol, and Veraval before taking a sharp turn south-east towards Mumbai. Karachi via Gujarat is not the only sea route to Mumbai. The other route, especially for illegal trade, is via Dubai for goods trade between India and Pakistan is restricted.

The sea trade between the neighbouring countries is governed by a 1974 protocol that does not allow third country flagships/vessels to lift India/Pakistan- bound cargo. Also, it does not allow the flag carriers of both countries to lift cargo for a third country from each other’s port.

In wake of the terrorst attack on Mumbai, India’s Navy and coast guards are expected to strengthen their intelligence and surveillance networks on the Gujarat waters. The Union Government is likely to put in place mechanisms for greater sharing of intelligence between the Navy, coast guards, the local police and central intelligence agencies like Raw.

But is intelligence only about official agencies is the moot question here. Do the locals, the fishermen along the Gujarat coast, figure in India’s scheme of things? This moot question should take us back to the post-Kargil days in Gujarat’s troubled waters.

Watch out for this space tomorrow for Mumbai Terror Aftermath – Part II