The Siege

by Adrian Levy

  Maria bit his lip and quietly dispatched a trusted Crime Branch inspector to shadow the Additional Commissioner and make sure he did not screw it up. There were five questions he needed answering at this critical juncture: how many terrorists were there, who sent them, how had they entered the city, what was their aim and where was the location of their control? ‘Open the prisoner’s mouth and check for cyanide,’ he shouted after his man.

  At 00.56, Gafoor came back on the line. Where were Kamte and Karkare? Maria choked. ‘… Sir, Ashok [Kamte] is near the SB office, sir. He is covering the SB office, sir.’ But Kamte was not there. He had been down the road, in Rang Bhavan Lane, the victim of a deadly shooting, an incident that had been called in by many eyewitnesses and police patrols from shortly after midnight.

  What about the ATS chief, Hemant Karkare? ‘Sir … Sir, he … he … he … Hemant was … sir, at the CST railway station. I will find out the location and tell him to get in touch with you right away, sir.’ The Control Room log showed that the ATS chief had called in his decision to leave CST for Cama Hospital at 23.24, more than an hour and a half earlier.

  The Commissioner pressed on, unsure of what he was being told: ‘I only want to know whether Mr Karkare and Kamte are injured or are they safe?’ Maria, normally unflappable, replied: ‘Sir, trying to do that, sir. Sir, as for the report … that there was firing on East Region [Kamte] vehicle, nobody is injured. As soon as I get through I will get back to you.’ There was no mention of the bullet-riddled Qualis in which all three officers had been gunned down. ‘You will send a party … ?’ the Commissioner asked. ‘Already done, sir … Already done, sir. Additional CP Crime and there are three units of Crime Branch on the job, sir,’ Maria said, signing off.

  Nine minutes earlier, Karkare’s radio operator had called Control to confirm that the fallen officers were in transit to GT Hospital, where all of them were declared dead.

  1 a.m. – Nair Hospital

  Sandwiched between Mumbai Central railway station and the city’s Mahalaxmi racetrack (named after the goddess of luck and prosperity), Nair Hospital lay four miles north of the Taj. Chowpatty’s Additional Commissioner Tanaji Ghadge was already waiting, chewing a wodge of paan, a police belt cinching his overfed belly, when Ajmal Kasab was stretchered in.

  In a private room of the casualty ward, Ajmal was stripped, cleaned up and placed on a metal bed on top of a green plastic sheet, his torso left bare, a rough wool blanket thrown over his belly. He lay connected to a drip, his right arm and left hand bandaged, both hands blackened with gunpowder.

  Ghadge got a camera rolling and focused on the quivering prisoner. Facing the ceiling, eyes closed, Ajmal wailed: ‘I have committed a big mistake.’ He was terrified. Ghadge leant over, chewing. ‘On whose order?’ With the simplicity of a country boy, Ajmal replied through parched lips: ‘On the orders of chacha. The one from Lashkar.’ Without being pressed, Ajmal had coughed the one thing no one was supposed to find out – the mastermind behind the attack.

  But Ghadge had not noticed. He stumbled over the words ‘uncle’ and ‘lashkar’. ‘Lashkar what? Which village is he from?’ he asked, confusing the outfit’s name with a word meaning ‘village defence committee’. He bamboozled Ajmal, too. Soon they were talking at cross-purposes. ‘I don’t know about his village,’ Ajmal said, ‘but he has an office.’ He was referring to Zaki’s headquarters at the House of the Holy Warriors, above Muzaffarabad, another fact that sailed over Ghadge’s head.

  ‘Who persuaded you to go there?’ Ghadge asked, and the boy winced. ‘My father told me, “We are very poor. You will also earn money like the others.” ’

  ‘Your real father?’ Already Ghadge was building his case that the entire family were co-conspirators.

  ‘Real father … real father,’ the boy replied quietly, seeming to drift back to the tongue-lashings and beatings that had driven him out of Faridkot. ‘He said we’ll earn money like the others.’

  Out of shot, the room was packed with policemen, who whispered urgently. A dozen had descended on Nair Hospital after hearing the news. Meanwhile, Ghadge went back to the beginning. ‘OK, what’s your name?’

  That was easy: ‘Ajmal.’

  ‘What’s your age?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘Where is your gaon [village]?’

  ‘Faridkot in tehsil [administrative district] Depalpur, district Okara.’ Some in the room began to make calls. Here was first proof that the assault had emanated from Pakistan, the fact that Lashkar had worked so hard to mask, using Internet telephony, cutting off all clothing labels, shaving the gunmen’s hair, dressing them in Western garb, with bracelets blessed in a Hindu temple tied around their wrists, Indian student ID cards in their trouser pockets.

  But Ghadge became wrapped up in recording the suspect’s extended bio-data. Directions for Ajmal’s maternal uncle’s house – the policeman needed them. Questions about his elder brother’s wife – name and address? Why had she gone back home after the row with her husband over household expenses – and what was the name of the bank that one passed on the way to their house? He was bogged down in the kitchen sink drama of Ajmal Kasab’s family. While, outside in the city, guests and staff were being culled in the ongoing slaughter at the burning Taj, Trident–Oberoi and Chabad House, Ghadge tripped over alien road names, village locations and Punjabi patronymics.

  Repeat. Say again. Tell me once more. Even the prisoner grew frustrated, forced into drawing figurative sketches of distant relatives who were illiterate farmers and school kids that he not given a thought to for many years.

  He tried to spit it out. ‘Look, my father told me we are very poor and then he introduced me to Lashkar men.’ He was twisting the story slightly, making his hated father the instigator, when it had been him and his friend, intoxicated by the carnival in Rawalpindi, who had got themselves dragooned into Lashkar. And whether it was the distance between this municipal bed and his cot in Faridkot, or the thought of his tyrannical father and the mother with a brittle laugh whom he would never see again, Ajmal began to cry.

  Ghadge trundled on: ‘Is your father connected to Lashkar?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Ajmal said, sniffing, righting the record. ‘They keep telling people it is jihad. It is a very honourable and daring job. You will earn lot of money and your poverty will be eliminated.’

  Ghadge suddenly got on track. ‘When did your training start?’ Around him, the officers exhaled a collective sigh of relief. In the background, a TV was reporting the deaths of Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte – but all eyes were on the prisoner. ‘It was snowing that time,’ Ajmal said. ‘I was training in Battal village.’ Another crucial piece of intelligence slipped from his lips: the Mansehra training camp. Did he hope to save himself, or was it that he had only ever been trained to die?

  ‘Our boss used to tell us that you will go to heaven. I said, “I don’t like this … and I don’t want to stay here.” ’ His eyes dilated. He had hoped someone would turn up at the outfit’s camp to take him away. Instead he had become part of a fidayeen outfit. ‘We were told, “Keep firing till death”,’ he said.

  Ghadge twigged: ‘You are here for jihad?’

  ‘What jihad, sir?’ asked Ajmal, crying. The refrain that had been sung in the mountains of Muzaffarabad seemed meaningless in a hospital ward.

  ‘You have killed people like yourself.’

  ‘Yes, God will not forgive me,’ replied Ajmal, crestfallen. ‘They promised to give big amount of money to my family.’

  ‘Who will give?’

  ‘Chacha will give,’ Ajmal said.

  ‘Who is Chacha?’ Ajmal did not fight it. ‘His name is chacha Zaki. He has a long beard, he is around forty to forty-five years old.’ The boy stared at Ghadge. ‘He is a jihadi and fought during wars with Russia.’ Phones were picked up. The ATS or intelligence services would be able to work out who this chacha Zaki was. In a subcontinent without comprehensive DNA databases or identity cards, where complex fam
ily names had multiple spellings, and where radicals swapped their birth names for a nom de guerre, long lists were kept of known aliases.

  Ajmal recited chacha’s words: ‘We are Muslims. This is not humanity. They have left you in poverty and are ahead of you.’ He looked up at the ceiling and recalled all the other backwater boys who had trained with him. ‘They taunt us about poverty. These places are full of poor people, who else will go there?’

  ‘Have they given you money?’

  ‘No. They may have given three lakh rupees [£2,300] to my father.’ A small price for a son.

  Ghadge summed it up: ‘That means your father used you.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ajmal replied, lips trembling, as a gloom enveloped him.

  A pause.

  ‘What was Ismail’s role?’

  Why hold out? Ajmal gave it all up. ‘Ismail was in charge.’ Elsewhere in the room, mobiles lit up again with the news that the police had killed the ringleader.

  He volunteered two more names. Ali and Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ (the elder), twenty-five, wearing a red shirt, and a red cap with the word ‘Yeshu’ written on it.

  ‘Yeshu?’ Ghadge asked. ‘You mean Christ?’

  ‘Yes’

  ‘But you are all Muslims?’

  ‘Yes, but you see, we had to look like them.’ He spelled it out for the officer.

  Red shirt. The call went out. Rajvardhan, in the Taj CCTV room picked it up. Red shirt aka Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ was one of the Taj attackers.

  The prisoner was flowing. ‘There is Umer, Akasha, Fahadullah, another Abdul Rehman, this one ‘Chhota’ [small]. Then there was Shoaib and Umar.’ One month earlier the team had relocated to a safe house in Karachi, where they were paired off into ‘buddies’ and shown films of their targets in Mumbai. Each pair of buddies had a mobile between them, pre-programmed with numbers to call. There were eight more of them in the city, besides Ajmal and Ismail.

  The phone tap was now more important than ever.

  There was no time to mourn the ATS chief, Karkare. His deputy, Parambir Singh, had to step up, signing off the ATS intercept request, by which time the intelligence agencies had passed to the technical section two more mobile phone numbers to monitor. Shortly after 1 a.m., +91 9910 719 424, the first of the three, rang, and Inspector Nivruti Kadam, the head of the ATS technical section, sitting in his office in Nagpada, listened in.

  ‘Hello.’ The caller was referred to as ‘Brother Wasi’. Kadam made a note. Wasi sounded like a nom de guerre. They would check it.

  Wasi: ‘Man, the media is reporting your room number …’

  Kadam now knew that Wasi was not a gunman. Wasi was their handler. He was controlling, cajoling and advising the gunmen, and watching the assault on TV. The killers in Mumbai were being remotely directed. Kadam scoured the conversation for clues as to the location of the control – and the gunman, who must be in some hotel room, placing them either in the Trident–Oberoi or the Taj.

  ATS needed a shorthand to map the calls. T was for terrorist and C for control or Wasi.

  T: ‘Yes, there are cameras here.’ The gunmen had spotted CCTV cameras.

  C: ‘Where you can see cameras, fire at them. Keep these things in mind. These things expose you. Where you are? How many guys are there? What condition you all are in?’

  Is this their first status update?, Inspector Kadam wondered.

  Wasi had a suggestion.

  C: ‘Why don’t you light fires?’

  T: ‘We have just started lighting the fires.’

  C: ‘Then we will see the flames of the fire rising here.’

  Every action had a reaction. And in this digitally enhanced world of terrorism and counter-terrorism, ATS officers were at their desks listening in to the killers, while their controller in an unknown location coached them, watching for evidence of their actions on rolling satellite news channels.

  Wasi jollied the gunmen along.

  C: ‘Yes, the media is reporting that there is a big operation underway at the Taj. One of your men should keep an eye on the stairs. Methodically, take a hidden, crouching position, wherever there are entry points.’

  The ATS had it. This gunman was inside the Taj. Inspector Kadam texted his acting chief.

  Wasi had more advice.

  C: ‘Fetch alcohol, remove the pillows in the rooms, collect all the cloth, set them on fire, methodically. Set fires on two to three floors. Then you sit down and wait.’

  Wasi also reasserted the need for discipline.

  C: ‘Whenever the phone call comes, you must attend it, my friend.’

  T: ‘OK.’

  Wasi explained how things would work.

  C: ‘Whatever the media is reporting, we will tell you. That way you can work accordingly.’

  T: ‘OK.’

  But Wasi still was not content.

  C: ‘My brother, you still haven’t thrown the grenade. Throw the grenade towards the seaside. There are many people standing there.’ Like everyone else, he was watching footage of the crowds milling outside the Taj.

  T explained: ‘I’m sending the two of them repeatedly, telling them to throw it towards the seaside. They say, “Yes, we will throw it.” But they come back without throwing them.’

  There was something surreally familial about the scene, like a father talking to an inattentive child. The gunmen were squabbling like kids tired of their duties.

  The gunman whispered to someone sitting next to him: ‘Brother, they’re saying light the fire. Light the fire.’

  The line went dead.

  Several minutes later, at 01.15, Wasi called again, and Inspector Kadam was listening in.

  C: ‘Are you lighting the fires or not?’ Wasi still could see no evidence on TV.

  T: ‘We are preparing for the fire. We are gathering clothes.’ It sounded like a juvenile excuse.

  C: ‘My friend, light it quickly. One thing that I wanted to ask you was what did you do with the launch?’

  Inspector Kadam stopped writing. A launch? So this was how they had come to Mumbai. Later this evidence would be matched with the eyewitness statements from the fishermen’s colony.

  T: ‘We left it.’

  C: ‘You didn’t open the lock to let the water in?’

  T: ‘No. We were rushing and made a mistake. We just left it and ran away.’

  Wasi, who did not know yet that Ajmal Kasab had been caught, was worried that the launch might expose the roots of the plot.

  T: ‘The waves were crashing in. We saw a boat. Everyone panicked, shouting, “Navy. Navy.” We ran away. Brother Ismail’s satellite got left there too.’

  Silence.

  Kadam noted down ‘Ismail’, the name of Ajmal’s dead partner, and called his boss. They urgently needed to find the launch and that satellite phone.

  Every ten minutes the phone rang. Wasi was on the Taj team’s back.

  At 01.25, another call came in.

  C: ‘Have the fires been lit yet or not?’ From the tone of his voice, he had not yet forgiven the launch and sat-phone fiasco.

  T: ‘Two men have gone, they haven’t returned yet.’

  C: ‘Have you collected curtains, pillows?’ Wasi sounded frustrated, as if he were biting his tongue.

  T: ‘We have collected everything. We have found a bottle of liquor. We also have hostages with us.’

  Kadam texted his boss. It was just as Patil and Rajvardhan had warned. The gunmen had seized hostages. Kadam passed on the nugget and one more: one of the Taj teams had dropped a mobile phone on the ground floor. The cops in the hotel should look out for it.

  Wasi wanted more information about the fire.

  C: ‘Who has gone to do it?’

  T: ‘Ali and Umer have gone.’

  Inspector Kadam underscored: Ali and Umer. Two more names, both of them the same as those Ajmal had given. Kadam noted that Ali had to be the terrorist in yellow, one of the two who had come into the Tower lobby with the crowd charging the front door. Umer was the one in bl
ack, one of the men who had attacked Leopold’s.

  C: ‘How many people do you have as hostages?’

  T: ‘There’s only one guy, we’re still sitting with him.’

  Kadam knew from Patil that this was K. R. Ramamoorthy, the banker, in 632. What were they planning for him?

  But Wasi moved on, summarizing the TV news reports, including rumours and conspiracies, seemingly incredulous at how well things were going.

  C: ‘The whole of Mumbai has been terrorized. More than 260 people have been injured, and some officers have been killed too. Fifty fidayeens have entered. Firing is happening at thirteen, fourteen places. By the Grace of Allah, the right atmosphere is building up.’ Fear was spreading throughout the city and beyond.

  Kadam, who had no idea about the numbers of fidayeen, texted his boss: ‘Are there really 50 gunmen in the city?’

  C: ‘The media is also saying that some minister is stuck in the hotel. Set fire to the rooms, so that the minister burns and loses his life.’ The TV coverage was proving critical to the assault.

  T: ‘Here there are five thousand rooms. Don’t know where he is.’ The gunman sounded sulky.

  Wasi had a practical solution.

  C: ‘That is not a problem. If by the Grace of Allah you set fire to the entire hotel, then he will burn anyhow.’

  Inspector Kadam could hear shots being fired. Wasi heard it too.

  C: ‘What is it? Are they firing?’

  T: ‘Yes. The work has started downstairs.’ Umer and Ali were shooting at something or someone was shooting at them. Kadam wondered if it was the SB2 chief Rajvardhan, firing up from the CCTV room on the second floor. He was always spoiling for a fight.

  C: ‘OK, my friend, have you covered the stairs?’ Wasi was thinking tactically.

  T: ‘No, we don’t. We are here sitting down.’

  The ATS wondered why Commissioner Gafoor was standing the men down when they could advance on 632 now.