By Mark McDonald and Alan Cowell
Published: November 27, 2008
HONG KONG: A day after the terror attacks in Mumbai that killed over 100 people, one question remained as impenetrable as the smoke that still billowed from two of the city's landmark hotels: who carried out the attacks?
Security officials and experts agreed that the assaults represented a marked departure in scope and ambition from other recent terrorist attacks in India, which have singled out local people rather than foreigners and hit single rather than multiple targets.
The Mumbai assault, by contrast, was "uniquely disturbing," said Sajjan Gohel, a security expert in London, because it seemed directed at foreigners, involved hostage taking and was aimed at multiple "soft, symbolic targets." The attacks "aimed to create maximum terror and human carnage and damage the economy," he said in a telephone interview.
But the central riddle was the extent to which local assailants had outside support. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India said the attacks probably had "external linkages," reflecting calculations among Indian officials that the level of planning, preparation and coordination could not have been achieved without help from experienced terrorists, particularly groups affiliated to Al Qaeda. The planning of the attack has profound political implications for both India and its neighbor, Pakistan.
But the identity of the Mumbai attackers remained a mystery.
An e-mail message to Indian media outlets taking responsibility for the attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen. Almost universally, experts and intelligence officials said that name was unknown.
Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. But the combination of the two, said Gohel in London, is a "front name. This group is nonexistent."
"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism."
An Indian security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified said the name suggested ties to a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.
On Sept. 15, an e-mail message published in Indian newspapers and said to have been sent by representatives of Indian Mujahedeen threatened potential "deadly attacks" in Mumbai. The message warned counterterrorism officials in the city that "you are already on our hit-list and this time very, very seriously."
Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were, indeed, reported killed in the attacks in Mumbai.
Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.
"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage-taking and they don't do grenades." By contrast, Gohel in London said "the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group."
Hoffman said the attacks, which he called "tactical, sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the perpetrators.
The Indian security official said the attackers likely had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. On Thursday, the group denied involved in the Mumbai attacks. India blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a suicide assault on its Parliament by gunmen in December, 2001 that led to a perilous military standoff with Pakistan.
In London, Gohel said the Mumbai assaults seemed to blend the tactics of the attack on Parliament and an event two years earlier — the 1999 hijacking of an Air India flight to Afghanistan that affected foreigners and involved hostage-taking.
The Indian official also suggested the foot-soldiers in the attack might have emerged from an outlawed militant group of Islamic students. Photographs from security cameras showed some youthful attackers carrying assault rifles and smiling as they began the operation.
"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," Fair said. "The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.
"The public political face of India says, 'Our Muslims have not been radicalized.' But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that's not true. India's Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad," she said. "Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. 'Al Qaeda's in your toilet!' But this is a domestic issue. This is not India's 9/11."
That, too, was disputed by the Indian official. "This was Mumbai's 9/11," he said. The consequences of the attack, the official said, may be to disrupt any overtures to Pakistan and to ignite a backlash against Indian Muslims.
Reflecting a widespread assessment in Pakistan, Moonis Ahmar, a professor of international relations at the University of Karachi, called the attacks a well-thought out conspiracy designed to destabilize relations between India and Pakistan and sabotage efforts at reconciliation.
Hindus make up about 80 percent of India's 1.13 billion population and Muslims 13.4 percent. A European security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his organization's rules, said it was "too soon for a proper analysis" while Indian forces were still seeking to end the crisis. Theories about outside involvement, including the potential role of Al Qaeda, were not yet proven, he said.
AuthorInfo: Alan Cowell reported from Paris; Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt, Germany; Mark McDonald from Hong Kong; and Salman Masood from Islamabad.
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