India clears last siege site

2008-12-01 09:44

Mumbai - Authorities finished removing bodies from the bullet-and-grenade-scarred Taj Mahal hotel on Monday, the final site of the Mumbai siege to be cleared, and said the death toll from the attack stood at 172 killed.

Security forces were scouring the 565 room hotel for booby traps and bodies, and declared the landmark building cleared two days after they killed the last three militants holed up inside following a deadly, three-day rampage in India's financial centre.

"We were apprehensive about more bodies being found. But this is not likely - all rooms in the Taj have been opened and checked," said Maharashtra state government spokesperson Bhushan Gagrani.

The army had already cleared two other sites, the five-star Oberoi hotel and the headquarters of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Centre.

The only gunman captured after the 60-hour terrorist siege of Mumbai said he belonged to a Pakistani militant group with links to the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, a senior police officer said.

The gunman was one of 10 who paralysed the city in an attack that killed at least 172 people and wounded 239 and revealed the weakness of India's security apparatus. India's top law enforcement official resigned on Sunday, bowing to growing criticism that the attackers appeared better trained, better co-ordinated and better armed than police.

The announcement blaming militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, threatened to escalate tensions between India and Pakistan. However, Indian officials have been cautious about accusing Pakistan's government of complicity.

Woefully unprepared security forces

Lashkar, long seen as a creation of the Pakistani intelligence service to help fight India in disputed Kashmir, was banned in Pakistan in 2002 under pressure from the US, a year after Washington and Britain listed it a terrorist group. It is since believed to have emerged under another name, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, though that group has denied links to the Mumbai attack.

As more details of the response to the attack emerged, a picture formed of woefully unprepared security forces.

"These guys could do it next week again in Mumbai and our responses would be exactly the same," said Ajai Sahni, head of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management who has close ties to India's police and intelligence.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised to strengthen maritime and air security and look into creating a new federal investigative agency.

Joint Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria said the only known surviving gunman, Ajmal Qasab, told police he was trained at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistan.

"Lashkar-e-Taiba is behind the terrorist acts in the city," he said.

Pakistani President Asif Zardari's spokesperson dismissed the claim.

'No evidence has yet been provided'

"We have demanded evidence of the complicity of any Pakistani group. No evidence has yet been provided," said spokesperson Farhatullah Babar.

In the first wave of the attacks, two young gunmen armed with assault rifles blithely ignored more than 60 police officers patrolling the city's main train station and sprayed bullets into the crowd.

Bapu Thombre, assistant commissioner with the Mumbai railway police, said the police were armed mainly with batons or World War I-era rifles and spread out across the station.

"They are not trained to respond to major attacks," he said.

The gunmen continued their rampage outside the station. They eventually ambushed a police van, killed five officers inside - including the city's counterterrorism chief - and hijacked the vehicle as two wounded officers lay bleeding in the back seat.

"The way Mumbai police handled the situation, they were not combat ready," said Jimmy Katrak, a security consultant. "You don't need the Indian army to neutralise eight to nine people."

Constable Arun Jadhav, one of the wounded policemen, said the men laughed when they noticed the dead officers wore bulletproof vests.

Slow pace of operations

With no SWAT team in this city of 18 million, authorities called in the only unit in the country trained to deal with such crises. But the National Security Guards, which largely devotes its resources to protecting top officials, is based outside of New Delhi and it took the commandos nearly 10 hours to reach the scene.

That gave the gunmen time to consolidate control over two luxury hotels and a Jewish centre, said Sahni.

As the siege dragged on, local police improperly strapped on ill-fitting bulletproof vests. Few had two-way radios to communicate.

Even the commandos lacked night vision goggles and thermal sensors that would have allowed them to locate the hostages and gunmen inside the buildings, Sahni said.

Security forces announced they had killed four gunmen and ended the siege at the mammoth Taj Mahal hotel on Thursday night, only to have fighting erupt there again the next day. Only on Saturday morning did they actually kill the last remaining gunmen.

At the Jewish centre, commandos rappelled from a helicopter onto the roof and slowly descended the narrow, five-storey building in a 10-hour shooting and grenade battle with the two gunmen inside.

From his home in Israel, Assaf Hefetz, a former Israeli police commissioner who created the country's police anti-terror unit three decades ago, watched the slow-motion operation in disbelief.

The commandos should have swarmed the building in a massive, co-ordinated attack that would have overwhelmed the gunmen and ended the stand-off in seconds, he said.

"You have to come from the roof and all the windows and all the doors and create other entrances by demolition charges," he said.

The slow pace of the operations made it appear that the commandos' main goal was to stay safe, Hefetz said.

JK Dutt, director-general of the commando unit, defended their tactics.

"We have conducted the operation in the way we are trained and in the way we like to do it," he said.

- AP