WSJ: India names Mumbai mastermind

Posted By Blake Hounshell Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - 6:51 AM Share

Good story in the Wall Street Journal about Yusuf Muzammil, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader who India believes is a key figure in the Mumbai attacks:

Just two days before hitting the city, the group of 10 terrorists who ravaged India's financial capital communicated with Yusuf Muzammil and four other Lashkar leaders via a satellite phone that they left behind on a fishing trawler they hijacked to get to Mumbai, a senior Mumbai police official told The Wall Street Journal. The entire group also underwent rigorous training in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, the official said.

This much has already been widely reported, with some minor discrepancies about where the satellite phone was found. But here's a new wrinkle:

Mr. Muzammil had earlier been in touch with an Indian Muslim extremist who scoped out Mumbai locations for possible attack before he was arrested early this year, said another senior Indian police official. The Indian man, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, had in his possession layouts drawn up for the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel and Mumbai's main railway station, both prime targets of last week's attack, the police official said.

Mr. Ansari, who also made sketches and maps of locations in southern Mumbai that weren't attacked, had met Mr. Muzammil and trained at the same Lashkar camp as the terrorists in last week's attack, an official said.

EXPLORE:SOUTH ASIA, INDIA, PAKISTAN, TERRORISM
 

VOTE4YOSSARIAN

8:36 AM ET

December 3, 2008

also...

Ignatius askes from the back page of the WaPo if it will happen here... who knows? If the Indian government had tried to seal it's coastline to some degree and thwarted the attack, then nothing would have happened and they would have been accused of over-militarization.

This is the problem with terrorism - it doesn't matter how many people get killed, it matters how many people watch on TV. The style of the Mumbai attacks seems to be more captivating than the death toll, so a success for the attackers' handlers. I think this was the case with the 9/11 attacks as well. The idea that multiple jumbo jets were simultaneously hijacked and flown into skyscrapers in lower Manhattan is etched more into peoples' memories than the fact that 3000 people died.

It is to make citizens feel vulnerable that is the true goal of terrorism...and, sadly, attacks like this work.

It seems now, though, that the propoer amount of attention will be focused on the true dangers of Pakistan's demise in to nearly failed-state status...I hope Hillary likes Islamabad in the winter, because that's where she should be come February.

 

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