Setting out to kill, undetected, in Mumbai
By Keith Bradsher
Sunday, November 30, 2008
MUMBAI: As Prasan Dhanur prepared his 13-foot boat on Wednesday evening for a hard night of fishing, he saw something strange.
A black inflatable lifeboat equipped with a brand new Yamaha outboard motor threaded its way among the small, wooden fishing boats at anchor and pulled up to the concrete pier of the slum where Dhanur, 24, has lived his whole life as a fisherman.
Ten men, all apparently in their early 20s, jumped out. They stripped off orange windbreakers to reveal T-shirts and blue jeans. Then they began hoisting large, heavy backpacks out of the boat and onto their shoulders, each taking care to claim the pack assigned to him.
Dhanur flipped his boat light toward the men, and Kashinath Patil, a 72-year-old harbor official on duty nearby, asked the men what they were doing.
"I said: 'Where are you going? What's in your bags?"' Patil recalled.
"They said: 'We don't want any attention. Don't bother us."' Thus began a crucial phase of the recent terror attacks, one that seemed from the start to be coordinated meticulously to cause maximum fear and chaos.
Dhanur and Patil said in interviews that they did not see the guns hidden in the backpacks and did not call the police as they watched the 10 men walk into town on Wednesday, leaving their boat and windbreakers at the dock. Fanning out across South Mumbai, the men began unleashing deadly assaults everywhere they went.
With proximity to Pakistan and visibility as the hub of India's financial sector, Mumbai has suffered many terrorist attacks over the years. But the killings last week, played out so publicly and prolonged over so many days, have shaken many as never before.
"In 51 years, I have never seen this kind of thing," said Dev Gohil, a tailor and lifelong Mumbai resident who lost a neighbor, another tailor who was locking up his street-front shop nearby when a gunman saw him and killed him. "We're scared for ourselves and for our families." At least nine attackers were confirmed dead by Sunday and one was captured, which would appear to account for all 10 men seen by Dhanur and Patil. Local media have reported that there might have been additional boatloads of gunmen, or that some gunmen may have already been staying in city hotel rooms and joined the attackers, but the authorities said over the weekend that there were 10 attackers.
As security forces seek to reconstruct how the gunmen managed to inflict so much carnage so quickly, they have been turning their attention to how so many assailants managed to reach the heart of Mumbai undetected and with such a large collection of guns, ammunition and explosives.
Fishermen here said that the police removed and impounded the boat that came ashore at the Fishermen's Colony pier where Dhanur lives.
Kulprit Yadav, a spokesman in Delhi for India's coast guard, said that an Indian fishing trawler, the Kuber, disappeared on Nov. 14 and had just been found close to Mumbai, abandoned. The Kuber's 30-year-old captain was found dead on the boat, and his four crew members were missing.
That discovery has led the authorities to suspect that the Kuber may have been hijacked and used as a so-called mother ship to transport inflatable rafts within range of South Mumbai - much as pirate mother ships from Somalia, across the Arabian Sea from Mumbai, have used smaller boats to hijack tankers and other vessels in recent weeks.
When the terrorists landed in front of Dhanur's boat, they were just three blocks straight down a narrow lane from Nariman House, a five-story building housing a Jewish center run by a young rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, and his wife, Rivka, who had moved from New York.
But the attack does not appear to have started there. According to the Indian Home Affairs Ministry, the first shots were fired at the train station, and soon after that at a police station, where an officer was killed, and at the Leopold Café.
Popular with tourists, the café is about eight blocks from the dock where Dhanur was surprised by the arrival of the inflatable raft. It is just a block behind a top target for the terrorists: the luxurious Taj hotel, Mumbai's most famous place for maharajahs and wealthy businesspeople to stay.
A large red sign over the two double-width entrances to the Leopold Café still boasts that the restaurant has been in business "since 1871." But the steel shutters of the Leopold Café were pulled down over the entrances on Friday afternoon, sealing the site of a deadly assault. Two attackers stood at the front, one at each entrance, and one threw a grenade before both and raked the diners with heavy fire from assault rifles. The power of the rounds is still visible from three shots that missed the diners. They struck the thick concrete columns on either side of an entrance and penetrated more than an inch deep, leaving red stains.
Through a gap at the top of the shutters, the darkened restaurant could still be seen on Friday. Half-eaten meals still sat on tables, and napkins lay on tables and chairs, as though the diners had disappeared suddenly into thin air.
Few signs of the fallen remained visible by Friday afternoon. Farzad Jehani, one of the owners of the café, said on Sunday that the attack had killed eight diners - four foreigners and four Indians - and fatally wounded a waiter, an Indian who staggered out into the street before succumbing to his wounds. Another waiter, also Indian, was fatally shot in the back as he fled down an adjacent street.
On Sunday, staff finished cleaning the premises and prepared to reopen for business at 11 a.m. But the restaurant was later told not to reopen for security reasons, and remained closed on Sunday afternoon.
Jehani, a member of the family that has run the restaurant for more than 75 years, said that the restaurant would not fill in the 12-centimeter-wide, 5-centimeter-deep, or 5-inch-wide, 2-inch-deep, crater left by grenade that one of the two attackers threw before they began shooting.
Jehani was upstairs at the time of the attack, watching India's cricket victory over England. "It sounded like a huge blast, and then the machine gunning started," he said.
The terrorists then attacked and occupied three buildings from which the police would find it very difficult to dislodge them: the Taj and Oberoi hotels and Nariman House.
At the hotels, the attackers managed to hide in a maze of rooms, especially at the Taj, and so avoided easy capture. The smaller Oberoi proved more difficult for the assailants, and they were defeated there first, with the police leading out dozens of hostages at midday on Friday.
Nariman House took a full day on Friday for the army to capture, as the attackers holed themselves up in the middle floors of the building, where they could not easily be reached from the ground or from above. Only on Friday evening were the assailants finally overwhelmed.
The most complex building, the Taj Hotel, with its many passageways, took the longest to clear. The National Security Guard announced Saturday morning that it believed the last three gunmen had been killed and declared the siege over.
Setting out to kill, undetected, in Mumbai - International Herald Tribune
and the topis with Pakistani shop names (No topi in Pakistan has shop names or with tags). Seems like Indians are putting topi on Pakistan or they are just too topis. 
