The charge-sheet is filed against the July 11 bombers, but the police case is full of holes.
PRAVEEN SWAMI in MumbaiLATE in the autumn of 2003, the two most important Indian operatives of the Lashkar-e-Taiba met under the flyover on the Western Express Highway in Mumbai: just a few hundred metres, ironically enough, from the home of Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, the man who had in part led them to turn to the religious Right, and not much further from the headquarters of India's counter-terrorism covert service.
Mumbai businessman Faisal Sheikh, who had trained in 1999 with the Lashkar's Pakistan-based operations commander Mohammad Azam Cheema, had cash and instructions for his long-standing friend, Rahil Abdul Rehman Sheikh. Rahil Sheikh was to arrange for passports and tickets for over a dozen Lashkar cadre from Gujarat and Maharashtra, so they could secretly travel to be trained for a special operation.
Faisal Sheikh, investigators say, personally planted one of the bombs that claimed 187 lives on July 11, in the worst-but-one terror strike ever to take place on Indian soil - an act that marked the climax of the months of work he had put into the operation. News of the bombings, informants later told Indian intelligence personnel, reached a Harkat ul-Jihad Islami-run safehouse near Dhaka used by Rahil Sheikh within minutes. Visibly euphoric, the informants said, he sent out for sweets.
Weeks before the July 11 bombings, Rahil Sheikh's own plans for a series of massive strikes in Gujarat had been terminated when the Intelligence Bureau located a massive arms cache in Aurangabad. Now, however, the networks he had helped build in Mumbai, and the men he had helped recruit, motivate and train, had delivered.
Strangely enough, Rahil Sheikh and the elaborate trans-border Lashkar networks he was a part of have been erased out of the official account of the Maximum Terror bombings - almost as if officials hope that the silence will make the threat go away. Nothing in the charge-sheet gives one a sense of the Lashkar's workings in western India, or, for that matter, of the mechanics of the Maximum Terror bombings themselves.
At first glance, the Mumbai serial bombings charge-sheet prepared by the Maharashtra Police Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) appears to be an epic effort: 10,667 pages long, the document represents the findings of an investigation that officials say took over 382,000 man-hours. Filed in November in a Mumbai court, the charge-sheet has been hailed as a damning indictment of the role of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate - but mainly by commentators who have not evidently had time to read it.
In fact, no great effort is needed to spot the enormous narrative discontinuities in the ATS account. Almost each part of the investigators' account of the events leading to the bombings - from the recruitment of cell members to the actual fabrication of explosives - is full of holes, which are certain to delight any half-competent defence lawyer.
Consider, for example, the mysteries that continue to shroud Faisal Sheikh's training in Pakistan. By the ATS account, Sheikh travelled to Pakistan on November 8, 2003, for a critical second round of training with the Lashkar-e-Taiba. While returning, the ATS claims, he destroyed his Indian travel documents and flew using a Pakistani passport, which identified him as Mohammad Akram. In Saudi Arabia, though, Sheikh was held for using fake documents, and was then deported - to India.
Investigators of the ATS ought, it stands to reason, to have examined just why an individual claiming to be a Pakistani was deported from Saudi Arabia to India - and just why authorities in Mumbai did not charge and prosecute Sheikh once he returned home. Judging by the charge-sheet, though, no explanations are available with the Maharashtra Police, for none was sought.
On the actual mechanics of the bombing, the charge-sheet at first glance appears more coherent. Still-untraced Lashkar operative Mohammad Ehsanullah, a Pakistani national, is thought to have transported the explosives from a safehouse near the India-Bangladesh border. Escorted by Kolkata resident Mohammad Majid Mohammad Shafi, a long-standing Lashkar operative, Ensanullah is thought to have travelled with three other Pakistani nationals who participated in the bombings. Kamal Ahmed Vakil Ansari, a resident of Bihar's Basupati village who had served time for a separate Lashkar operation in New Delhi, brought in three other Pakistani nationals through a separate route.
Not surprisingly, there are no witnesses to this part of the operation other than Shafi and Ansari. Barring their now-withdrawn confessional statements, there is little way of substantiating the story.
But key portions of the ATS account for which hard evidence could have been made available are shrouded in confusion. At a September 30 press conference, Mumbai Police chief A.N. Roy said that the pressure cookers used to house the explosives used in the bombings were purchased from a shop in Santa Cruz. However, the charge-sheet is silent on the use of pressure cookers as well as their point of purchase. As such, it seems the ATS was unable to secure the identification of the suspects by the staff at the store.
According to the charge-sheet, the explosives were manufactured in Sheikh Mohammad Ali Alam Sheikh's home, a one-room tenement in Mumbai's Govandi slum. Curiously, though, investigators have been unable to say from whom key bombing accused Asif Khan Bashir Khan purchased the ammonium nitrate and fuel oil that were mixed with the RDX (Research Department Explosive), or the detonator used to set it off - the suspect ought to have had no trouble answering questions on this issue.
Sajid Ansari and two Pakistani nationals, the charge-sheet asserts, fabricated the bombs in the Govandi tenement, working almost uninterruptedly from July 8 to 10. Alam Sheikh's family contests these charges; there has been no explanation from the ATS as to why the bombs could not have been made in the more spacious premises the cell had access to in Mira Road. Forensic evidence, though, does make clear that great care was taken to ensure that the bombs would work: their manufacturers used high-grade timers, planted multiple detonators and reinforced the circuits to rule out an electrical malfunction.
After the explosive devices were fabricated, the ATS charge-sheet alleges, cell commander Faisal Sheikh used his own car and a still-unidentified taxi to transport them to his apartment in Bandra. The explosives were then brought to Churchgate railway station, where they were finally planted on suburb-bound trains, by seven members of the cell in separate taxis. However, the ATS failed to find a single taxi driver who could remember transporting men with bags from Mumbai's central suburbs to Churchgate between 3:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. on July 11 - which again means there are no witnesses to substantiate the police account of this key portion of the crime.
Forensic experts, notably, were unable to find traces of RDX at the Mira Road home where Ehsanullah lived after arriving from Bangladesh, leaving open the question of just where the explosives were stored before being moved to Govandi - and why they were apart from the man who was, eventually, to turn them into usable devices.
Perhaps the weakest part of the ATS account is the role of Pakistani nationals in the bombings. In the charge-sheet, the ATS has repeated its earlier public declarations that one Pakistani national participated in each of the seven Lashkar assault units. However, the charge-sheet itself makes clear that the ATS failed to identify even a cover-name for the Pakistani nationals it claims were involved in the bombings at Mahim and Bandra. Of the 15 Pakistani nationals the ATS says participated in the bombings, it has provided details of six. In all these cases, the details are vague, sometimes just a single name of no evidentiary value.
Elements of the ATS story suggest that square-shaped facts are, so to speak, being squeezed into the gaping, round holes in the story. Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist Mohammad Chirag, a Pakistani national who was killed in an August 22 encounter at Mumbai's Antop Hill, has been identified by the ATS as a participant in the Mumbai bombings. However, the claim is contested by sources in the Mumbai Police, who say the terrorist was in fact detected in the course of an Intelligence Bureau operation that predated the bombings by several weeks. Mohammed Riaz Nawabuddin, who was arrested in the course of the operation that led to Chirag's death, has not been charged with bombing-related crimes - a fact of obvious significance.
As things stand, there is more than a little evidence that the networks that executed the bombings are intact. By the ATS account, four of the Pakistani nationals who participated in the bombings travelled through Gujarat, but there is no word on who harboured and escorted them there. Nor was the ATS able to detect the terror cell members who helped the Pakistani Lashkar operatives escape.
And, while the ATS has charged Dubai-based Rizwan Mohammad Davre, a key financier of the bombings, it is yet to put together a case for his extradition. As such, both inancial and cadre resources for future terror strikes are in place.
Maharashtra Police officials have been quick to compare their post-July 11 efforts with the Central Bureau of Investigation's (CBI) enormous investigation of the 1993 serial bombings. In fact, the comparison does the Maharashtra Police little credit. After 1993, CBI investigators carefully studied the complex organised crime networks used by the ISI to execute the bombings, and built up a coherent picture of the architecture of the terror attacks from the bottom up. Importantly, the organisation made no effort to obscure the fact that key perpetrators were out of its reach, and left the door open for future progress. As things stand, the ATS is yet to put together a full account of the structure and scale of the Lashkar networks in Maharashtra, let alone their linkages in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
If the Manmohan Singh government is serious about gathering the kinds of compelling evidence that will force Pakistan to hand over the Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders who ordered the Maximum Terror bombings - a claim that high officials in New Delhi have made more than once - it could do worse than to nudge Maharashtra in the direction of help for a task for which State officials seem to lack both the skills and the will to undertake.
COMMents
COMMents
SHARE