Contradictory accounts of Mumbai attacks

Fri, 11/28/2008 - 10:48pm

A few more supposed details from the interrogation of Ajmal Kamal, the militant who was captured, are trickling out in the Indian press. It seems pretty clear from all of the reports that 10-12 bad guys entered the city by inflatable boat. (The New York Times has some good color on their arrival at the Mumbai docks.) Beyond that, accounts differ widely.

Some stories say that there were eight terrorists already waiting in the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Hotels. The Times of India claims that all of the terrorists were Pakistani citizens, and that they had expected to make it back on the fishing trawler they hijacked. This was not a suicide mission.

To give you an idea of how disparate the accounts can be, the Times names the skipper of this purloined vessel as Amarjit Singh, while The Hindu says his name was Balwant Tandel. Rediff says there were two fishing boats. The Times says the terrorists left from "an isolated creek near Karachi," while Rediff reports that "Intelligence Bureau officials are trying to verify if the terrorists came in through the Persian Gulf." Rediff also mentions that its information comes from the interrogation of "Abu Ismail," while according to the Times a terrorist named "Ismail" was killed at Girgaum Chowpaty, a local beach.

All of the Indian press accounts I've read, however, point explicitly to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani militant group. NDTV even claims that one of the terrorist's phones was "used to call Lashkar commander Yusuf Muzamil in Muzaffarabad," the group's headquarters in Pakistan.

UPDATE: The Washington Post clears up some of the mystery:

On the basis of preliminary inquiry, we know that there were a total of 10 terrorists. Nine have been eliminated, one is caught," said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. "They split into teams of two for action, and there were four at the Taj."

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What a joke

pakistan is an absolute disaster of a country right now, but i'm holding my tongue on who is responsible for all this until some serious people start investigating. indian journalism is notoriously bad, highly politicized, and totally unreliable. the only thing it has been been good for is aiding in the spark of riots...