Maximum Terror and its mechanics

Evidence points to a Lashkar-e-Taiba role in the serial explosions on trains in Mumbai on July 11.

PRAVEEN SWAMI in Mumbai

RAHEEL ABDUL REHMAN SHEIKH, reads the title of a classified dossier on India's most wanted terrorist. There is no photograph. For all of his adult life Sheikh refused to have one taken on the grounds that Islam forbade graven images.

Justice for the more than 200 innocent people killed in the July 11 serial bombings in Mumbai will depend on whether India's covert services and the police in three States will be able to fill the blank space in the dossier. Sheikh, along with Aurangabad resident Zabiuddin Ansari and Beed-based Zulfikar Fayyaz Qazi, is thought to be the principal author of the maximum terror inflicted on what the author Suketu Mehta described as the "Maximum City".

Until his relationship with the Lashkar-e-Taiba drew the attention of the police and the intelligence services, Sheikh lived in a one-room apartment in a nondescript building near Shalimar Talkies, an old landmark in decline for the last two decades just like the neighbourhood around it on Grant Road.

Growing up in a climate defined by economic despair and the rise of Hindu chauvinist forces, Sheikh appears to have rejected Mumbai's sometimes-aggressive modernity. He turned, in his late teens, to the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, an ultra-conservative religious sect which urges its followers to model their lives on a literalist reading of the times and life of Prophet Mohammad. The Markazi Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, the sect's central body in India, endorses the secular state and condemns terrorism.

Much of the Lashkar's cadre, though, has been drawn from the ranks of the organisation and Sheikh proved receptive to its call. Sheikh is said to have begun working with the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) before its 1999 convention in Aurangabad, where the organisation's linkages with the Lashkar first manifested themselves. So far there is no evidence to show that Sheikh actually joined SIMI, but there is little doubt that he was drawn to the organisation.

If he was indeed at the 1999 convention, he may well have made his first contacts with the Lashkar there. Many of the speeches delivered at the convention were inflammatory. "Islam is our nation, not India," thundered Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmad, one of the dozens of SIMI-linked Lashkar operatives who would one day accept Sheikh as their commander. Among those listening to the speech was Azam Ghauri - one of the founders of the Lashkar in India.

Little is known about how Sheikh met the two other men alleged to have played a central role in the Mumbai bombings. However, the three shared an interest in the campaigns for moral purification and proselytising organised by the Ahl-e-Hadis. Sheikh, some say, attended a 2003 convention of the Ahl-e-Hadis in Srinagar, where he met top Lashkar operatives in Jammu and Kashmir. What is certain is this: within three years, Sheikh was at the centre of the largest-ever pan-India terror offensive.

Despite the charge of intelligence failure, there has rarely been a terrorist outrage so predictable - indeed, in fairness to the covert services, predicted so precisely. In late April, the Intelligence Bureau (I.B.) learned that a major consignment of arms had entered Maharashtra through India's western coast. Late on May 9, the Maharashtra Police recovered a part of that consignment - over 24 kilograms of Research Department Explosive (RDX) packed in computer cases, along with 11 AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and ammunition - but Zabiuddin Ansari, who was in charge of the Aurangabad cell, succeeded in escaping.

Investigators soon learned that the consignment was just part of a larger wave of explosives the Lashkar was pushing into western India and that the men they had arrested were only foot soldiers. Gujarat Police officials learned that a part of the explosives were intended for Zulfikar Fayyaz Qazi, who had earlier executed a terror strike in Ahmedabad. Of Sheikh, there was no trace.

As Maharashtra Director-General of Police P.S. Pasricha acknowledged, warnings of a large-scale terror strike had flowed in. What worried officials more was the large-scale flow of explosives to parallel terror cells than the escape of Sheikh or his associates. Intelligence Bureau officials learned that mafia lord Dawood Ibrahim - the architect of the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai - had made his network available to the Lashkar to facilitate its operations against India.

Gujarat, like Maharashtra, had been witnessing a flow of explosives, again linked to the Maharashtra-based cells Sheikh was running. One such consignment of 9 kg of RDX was delivered to Sheikh for use in a terror attack on Ahmedabad. Lashkar operative Mohammad Iqbal, a Bahawalpur resident who operated in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002-03 and whom the Delhi Police shot dead in March, had arranged for mafia-linked traffickers to smuggle the RDX across the Rann of Kutch and deliver it to Sheikh.

Sheikh handed over the consignment to new recruits, Feroze Abdul Ghaswala, an automobile mechanic, and Mohammad Ali Chippa, a computer engineer, to carry out the bombing. He had earlier arranged for both men to fly to Teheran, from where they drove across the unpoliced Balochistan border with Pakistan. Azam Cheema, the Lashkar's overall military chief, received the new recruits, who underwent a four-week bomb-making course before returning to Mumbai.

However, the Delhi Police penetrated and broke the Ghaswala-Chippa cell and recovered the 9 kg of RDX. But a part of an earlier consignment of explosives sent through the Bhuj border was used in a bomb that exploded on a railway platform in Ahmedabad on February 19, injuring 25 people. This was the first time an RDX-based explosive was used in Gujarat. Sheikh is believed to have used Qazi to execute the bombing, which could have claimed dozens of lives had the electronic timer on the device not malfunctioned.

Dawood Ibrahim's renewed support for the Lashkar could be out of desperation and also the outcome of the mafia's new ideological affinities with Islamist terror groups. Some members of his mafia have links with the Tablighi Jamaat, a religious organisation that has considerable influence amongst Pakistan's military. During Dawood Ibrahim's long stay in Karachi, these links flowered into an operational relationship. In fact, much of the jehadi leadership is drawn from seminaries like the Jamia Islamia at Binori in Karachi.

Notably, the mafia's role in terror strikes is not restricted to shipping weapons. Dawood Ibrahim-affiliated ganglord `Chhota' Shakeel Ahmad Babu helped ship Ahmedabad residents recruited by the Jaish-e-Mohammad through Dhaka in 2001. Mafia operative Javed Hamidullah Siddiqui, who was arrested in 2004, told Indian authorities that Shakeel had arranged to have the group flown from Dhaka to Karachi on fake passports. Another mafia operative, Rasool Khan `Party', received the recruits in Pakistan.

Dawood Ibrahim's lieutenant Fahim Machmach is also believed to have handled a separate group of terror recruits through Bangkok, including two Bangalore residents who identified themselves using code names `Iqbal' and `Sohail'. Machmach, interestingly, is alleged to have supervised personally a 2003 attempt on the lives of Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Bharat Banot and Ashok Bhat, using the services of a long-standing mafia hit man, Vikram Parmar, also known as Ali Mohammad Kanjari.

Some experts believe that the real impetus for the Lashkar's pan-India war is coming from Jammu and Kashmir - pointing to the eight grenade attacks in Srinagar hours before the Mumbai bombings. The jury is still out on this proposition, for there is nothing to suggest that the explosives used in Mumbai came from Jammu and Kashmir. But evidence exists that for several years the Lashkar has been attempting to establish all-India capabilities.

In December, the Mumbai Police arrested Arshad Badroo, a National Conference-affiliated Municipal Councillor, and two other Jammu and Kashmir residents, Haji Mohammad Ramzan and Khurshid Ahmad Lone, key figures, it turned out, in a Lashkar bombing operation targeting the city. The three had been despatched to Mumbai by the Lashkar's north Kashmir `commander', an elusive 6-foot 6-inch Pakistani national known only by aliases `Bilal' and `Salahuddin.'

While Badroo had been tasked with picking up passports and a Rs.300,000 payment for the Lashkar, Ramzan and Lone had been asked to transport electronic circuits and detonators, essential components of bombs, to contacts in Mumbai. All three men were arrested before they could make contact with their local Lashkar contact, who some believe was Sheikh himself. Investigators are exploring whether the detonators were intended for the Lashkar's Mumbai operations.

Evidence that `Bilal' had contacts in Mumbai is significant in the context of the serial bombings - not least because of his demonstrated expertise in executing such attacks. As second-in-command to his predecessor, a Pakistani national known only by the code name `Abu Huzaifa', Bilal had helped organise the serial bombings in New Delhi last year. While Abu Huzaifa was killed soon after the bombings, the pan-India networks he set up were, for the most part, inherited by Bilal.

Lashkar networks in Mumbai have evolved steadily since the Kargil war. In August 1999, the I.B. succeeded in breaking a pan-India network led by Lashkar operative Amir Khan, which had been tasked with recruiting cadre from amongst communities hit by communal violence. Despite this success, the Lashkar was still able to build offensive capabilities. In November 2000, the police arrested three Lashkar cadre, all Pakistani nationals, who were planning to assassinate Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray.

By 2004, Bilal's unit was poised to execute even more ambitious operations targeting Mumbai. Shahid Ahmad, a Rawalpindi resident who had served with the Lashkar for several years, was tasked with organising a major attack against the Bombay Stock Exchange. He turned to Manzoor Ahmad Chilloo, a one-time Hizb ul-Mujahideen member who had left Jammu and Kashmir to study medicine in Pune. Chilloo, in turn, turned to former members of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) for help. A dramatic I.B. operation led to the detection and exposure of the cell. (The same operation also led to the controversial elimination of Lashkar operative Ishrat Jehan Raza and her lover Javed Sheikh in an encounter.) Few commentators paid attention, though, to the real lessons that emerged. Despite the threat of an India-Pakistan war forcing a reduction of levels of violence within Jammu and Kashmir, the Lashkar was looking to take its jehad to a new level.

"The Hindu," wrote the Lashkar's founder and spiritual guide Hafiz Mohammed Saeed in 1999, "is a mean enemy and the proper way to deal with him is the one adopted by our forefathers, who crushed them by force." Most of the few people who read Saeed's article dismissed it, correctly, as the rant of a lunatic and then made the error of dismissing his repeated promises to deliver maximum terror. It is impossible after July 11 to make that mistake again.

More likely than not Sheikh, Qazi and Ansari will be arrested or killed. The three men are thought to be hiding out in Kathmandu. What is less clear is whether India will be able to act against the real authors of the serial bombings. Sheikh's immediate superior, a Pakistani Lashkar operative codenamed Junaid, who is responsible for pan-India terror operations, is ensconced in Dhaka. Azam Cheema, the Lashkar's overall military chief, in turn, is in Pakistan.

For the most part, Pakistan has dismissed Indian demands for action against terrorists operating from its soil. Journalists like Amir Mir, who exploded the official claim that Dawood Ibrahim was not in Pakistan, were subjected to state-sponsored attack, while affirmations by the United States about Dawood's presence in Pakistan have been met with silence. India's demand for the extradition of at least 20 other terrorism suspects, put forward in the midst of the 2001-2002 near-war, have also been ignored.

Pakistan's repeated denials that it harbours and trains terrorists are starting to wear thin, and not just in India. Shahzad Tanweer, one of the men who bombed the London underground system in July 2005, is thought to have been trained at a Lashkar-run facility.

Assem Hammoud, a Lebanese national arrested in Beirut this April for planning to bomb New York City, has also told his interrogators that he intended to acquire the specialist skills needed for the operation during a four-month terror course in Pakistan.

Incensed with Pakistan's support for Islamist terror groups operating in Afghanistan, the United States is also starting to turn on its long-standing ally. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made no secret of her anger with Pakistan's military regime, choosing not to address a joint press conference with Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Khurshid Kasuri, at the end of his recent visit to the United States - a gesture of disapproval that left little to the imagination.

Some signs of action are already evident. The police in Kathmandu, generally loath to involve themselves in international contention, arrested two Lashkar-linked Pakistani nationals on June 12. The arrests are reported to be related to the 2001 recovery of RDX from the home of Mohammad Arshad Cheema, a Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence officer operating under diplomatic cover. Cheema was expelled from Nepal amidst allegations that he had facilitated the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814.

But the script that will decide the Lashkar's long jehad will be authored in Islamabad, not Washington. As things stand, the Lashkar and other jehadi organisations have the resources to perpetrate acts of ever-increasing violence, secure in the knowledge that Pakistan's nuclear shield makes war near-impossible.

Poised at a crossroads in its history, the military-dominated establishment in Pakistan will have to decide if the next episode will see a happy ending or just another phase in a war without an end.