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New claims on local role in 26/11 dismissed by police

Praveen Swami

NEW DELHI: Police and intelligence personnel investigating the November 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba terror attack on Mumbai have dismissed speculation that a still-to-be-discovered terror cell may have played a role in the massacre.

Broadcast in the British Broadcasting Service’s award-winning programme, Newsnight, the claim appears to lend weight to long-standing claims by Hindu nationalist politicians and in sections of the media.

In April, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik also complained that India had failed to provide information on local involvement in the Mumbai attacks — without which, he claimed, the assault would not have been possible. Despite having key conspirators in their custody since December, Pakistani investigators have not so far named a single Indian suspect.

Mumbai police officials who spoke to The Hindu, though, dismissed the BBC’s claims, saying they thoroughly investigated the prospect that a Lashkar field unit in Mumbai provided tactical intelligence to the assault team — and came up with nothing.

“Minutes after the attacks began,” a senior official involved in the investigation told The Hindu, “the Intelligence Bureau used frequency-scanning equipment to listen in to the terrorists’ conversations with their handlers in Pakistan.”

“Early on,” he explained, “we arrived at precisely the same conclusion the media did — that one or more individuals were providing the terrorists information on the tactical movements of police units.”

But, the officer said, subsequent scrutiny forced the Mumbai police to revise this conclusion. “We sent covert teams to check out buildings from where spotters might have had a clear line of sight on to our movements, but they found nothing other than television crews.”

Electronic intelligence specialists from the Intelligence Bureau, who were monitoring cellphone traffic in the area, also found no voice or data traffic that suggested information was being passed on.

Nor did subsequent investigation throw up any suggestion of incoming or outgoing traffic to the Pakistan-based handlers’ voice-over-Internet accounts from numbers other than those used by the assault team, highly placed intelligence sources in New Delhi told The Hindu.

The Mumbai police investigators say the mystery was resolved only when off-duty officers found time to watch television: the terrorists’ handlers were basing their assessments on the Hindi broadcast medium.

From November 28, following a meeting between the former Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister, R.R. Patil, and the former Director-General of Police, A.N. Roy, State government officials began calling top television station officials to caution them against the broadcast of sensitive footage. By then, however, the damage had been done.

By the account of Newsnight correspondent Richard Watson, the BBC did not peruse the footage, although it has cast doubt on the credibility of the police claims. “I know the kind of live-shots used in these situations,” he wrote in a recent article, “and they would be unlikely to yield that kind of detail.”

The Mumbai police official said: “We checked the footage against the conversations very carefully, and we don’t think there’s a mystery to be solved. Perhaps the BBC should have looked at that footage too.”

Political motivation?

In his article, Mr. Watson suggests that Indian investigators may have political reasons for failing to pursue Indian suspects.

“Politically,” he wrote, “it would be very damaging for India to discover that local Indian Muslims were involved. “One man has been arrested and charged with providing video and maps of targets but he was in custody for another offence at the time of the attack,” Mr. Watson noted.

Leaving aside the fact that two Indians, not one, are now being tried for their role in the Mumbai attacks, the allegation sits ill with fact. All of the alleged Lashkar operatives being tried in Mumbai for their alleged role in bombing the city’s suburban train system in 2006 are Indian nationals. The police in Delhi, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat have similarly held Indian nationals for their role in a series of Lashkar-linked urban bombings that began in 2005.

“Why on earth would we want to hide something in this case alone,” the Mumbai police official asked.

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