By SPIEGEL Staff
It was a bizarre incident. Perhaps security officials should have seen what happened in March 2007 in the waters off Mumbai, a city of 18 million people, as a warning. That was when the crew of an Indian coast guard vessel noticed a fishing cutter coming from the north.
When the officers stopped the boat, they found, in addition to the crew, eight young Pakistani men who had no business being in Indian territorial waters. The men were so intent on being allowed to continue to Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, that they offered the Indian officials a bribe.
Indian paramilitary soldiers stand guard in front of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai.
The Indians took the money and allowed the eight Pakistanis to continue, but they were not truly corrupt. Instead, they quickly placed a small homing device on board the fishing boat and notified Indian intelligence.
A short time later, the Pakistanis were apprehended and questioned. The intelligence agents soon realized that they were dealing with Islamists from the Pakistani organization Lashkar-e Taiba. But they never learned what the men were doing in India.
Today, more than one-and-a-half years later, Indian intelligence agents are connecting the dots between that incident and last week's attacks in Mumbai. They believe that the Islamists may have been on a test run to figure out the best way to bring a certain number of men from Pakistan to Mumbai by sea.
That trip was probably a dress rehearsal for the attack that began last Wednesday evening. It ended in more than 170 dead and almost 300 wounded, after Mumbai was attacked by at least 10 Islamists. They arrived in inflatable boats, wore athletic shoes, trendy cargo trousers and backpacks -- young men who looked like backpacking students.
With the ongoing fire from their Kalashnikovs, and with hand grenades and explosives, the attackers set off a panic in India's largest city and the rest of the country. To the horror of the rest of the world, they targeted Americans, Brits and Israelis. Some holed up in the enormous Taj Mahal Hotel in the eastern part of the city, others went on a murdering spree in the five-star Hotel Oberoi-Trident, a few hundred meters away in western Mumbai, while a third group killed commuters at a train station farther north. The streets between these sites were transformed into a triangle of terror.
This was no ordinary, al-Qaida-style bombing. It was a military commando action, precisely planned and carried out in cold blood, a nightmare that lasted more than 45 hours, until the police and military finally managed to end the massacre.
An Outpost of the West in the East
Mumbai represents the side of India it wants the world to see: modern, open, capitalist, global and affluent, the financial capital of a country seeking international recognition. For this reason, no other city in India has attracted as much of the destructive fury of Islamists as this halo on the Arabian Sea.
Mumbai is like an outpost of the West in the East, a city of stock markets and the Bollywood film industry, the financial center and dream factory for a country of one billion people, India's New York and Los Angeles rolled into one. For those who want no part of the West's focus on money, globalization and modernity, Mumbai is a Western den of iniquity. For those who yearn to be a part of it, Mumbai is a melting pot.
The city is a magnet for thousands arriving from rural areas, who end up in teeming slums, hoping to work their way up to the sunny side one day. Mumbai, with its 18 million people, could soon be the world's second-largest city after Tokyo. There is unbelievable wealth and devastating poverty, and even without religion, Mumbai offers plenty of material for conflict fueled by hate.
The Islamist terrorists apparently hoped to strike two enemies at the same time. They wanted to strike a blow at modern India, to avenge their oppressed fellow Muslims and wrest part of the divided region of Kashmir from Indian control. But it was also an attack on the West, as evidenced by the terrorists' singling out of British and American citizens, by their targeting of the famous luxury hotels where foreigners stay and by their attack on a Jewish center. Up to 20 of the dead are foreigners, three of them apparently from Germany. The German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation has sent four officers to Mumbai.
In committing the murders, the terrorists added a global charge to a regional conflict. There are three powder kegs lined up next to each other in this region: ethnically diverse India, embattled Afghanistan and unstable Pakistan. These three countries contain enough explosive material to shake the entire world, especially because India and Pakistan, archenemies, have nuclear warheads and this attack could propel them toward new hostilities.
This melting together of conflicts is typical al-Qaida strategy from the Osama bin Laden school. It breaks down international borders. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine to Indonesia, wherever the supposed true believers are battling the supposed infidels, everything flows together into one great conflict, the "clash of civilizations" that US political scientist Samuel Huntington foresaw at the end of the Cold War. According to Huntington, the main battle lines would soon no longer be drawn between the two major blocs and ideologies, but between cultures and religions, especially between the Western and the Islamic worlds.
'Gateway to India'
The most recent battle in this war began when the Islamists' black-and-yellow inflatable boats set out -- presumably from a mother ship out at sea, as Indian investigators believe. They also speculate that some of the terrorists arrived by land a few days earlier, but that the men on the ship brought the weapons.
On Thursday, an Indian coast guard helicopter discovered the Kuber, a fishing trawler, unmanned and adrift in the Indian Ocean, with the body of a man believed to be the captain on board, his hands tied and his throat slit. The terrorists may have hijacked the boat. Investigators are currently analyzing the data on the ship's navigation system and satellite telephone. It could reveal where exactly the terrorists came from.
Where the attacks took place.
Once on land, the Islamists stole several cars and a police van. They separated into at least five groups and set off on their mission. Possibly the first shots -- officials have not yet been able to reconstruct the course of events leading up to Saturday morning -- fell at about 9:30 p.m. at the Chhatrapati Shivaji train station.
In the Victorian terminal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, at least two terrorists pulled automatic weapons out of their bags and began shooting randomly and tossing hand grenades at commuters. "The men seemed calm and focused. They were not in a hurry at all. They did not seem to be afraid of anything," says an employee at a nearby café. One of the men would fire while the other one reloaded, according to the café employee. About 40 people were killed or wounded.
'Pure Horror'
At about the same time, their collaborators began shooting wildly in the lobby of the 105-year-old Taj Mahal, a hotel popular among the international elite, including politicians, millionaires and celebrities. A palace with more than 565 rooms, hand-woven silk carpets, alabaster ceilings and crystal chandeliers, the Taj Mahal has accommodated such famous guests as Prince Charles, Jackie Onassis, David Rockefeller, Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger.
The Taj is a world-class hotel managed by an international staff, including a German deputy director. One night in a room in the hotel's main wing costs about $500 (€400), breakfast not included. The Taj is almost always filled with foreigners.
When the first shots fell, Erika Mann, a German Social Democratic politician and member of the European Parliament, was sitting in the hotel restaurant with some Indian acquaintances. She was in Mumbai to conduct negotiations on trade relations. "Odd, we thought, perhaps this is the gun salute for a wedding," she said a few days later. But what happened next, says Mann, was "pure horror."
The exact whereabouts of Ralph Burkei -- the treasurer of the Munich branch of Bavaria's conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) and vice president of TSV 1860, a Munich football club -- in those first few minutes are still unclear. Burkei, 51, a partner in C.A.M.P. TV, a media company that produces the program "Bayern Journal," was vacationing with his girlfriend at the Taj. He attempted to flee when the Islamists arrived, a move that would lead to his horrific death.
Andreas Liveras, 73, a British national with an estimated net worth of close to half a billion euros, remained relatively cool at the beginning. He earned a portion of his wealth with a frozen pastry business, but later in life he derived his income from chartering his two motorized yachts: The 90-meter (295-foot) Lauren and the 85-meter (279-foot) Alysia are available for rent beginning at €696,000 ($870,000), VAT not included.
When the shots began, Liveras took cover under a table in the restaurant. A short time later, he called the BBC to report on the fighting and bomb explosions around him. By then, complete mayhem had erupted on the streets of Mumbai. A taxi blew up under an overpass, and a few terrorists drove through the streets, shooting indiscriminately into the crowds. Some victims who had been brought to a hospital were shot at a second time by the terrorists in front of the hospital.
Five Islamists stormed a famous restaurant, the Café Leopold. According to the "Lonely Planet," the Leopold attracts tourists from around the world like moths to a flame. "All of a sudden there was shooting coming from automatic weapons, and the whole place exploded," says Diane Murphy, a British citizen. "It was extremely loud, and my husband and I were hit" -- she in the foot and he between the ribs. Within minutes, the interior walls were covered with bullet holes and people were lying in pools of blood. The terrorists also threw hand grenades in the restaurant. All that remained of one victim were his shoes.
A National Security Guard commando rappels from a helicopter near the Jewish center in Colaba district.
At roughly 9:45 p.m., a group of terrorists attacked a Jewish center in the Colaba tourist district. Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, and his wife Rivka, 28, ran the center as a so-called Chabad House, sponsored by the ultra-orthodox Lubavitch Society in New York. Chabad Houses serve as shelters, synagogues and meeting places for Jews in dozens of countries around the world.
The rabbi and his wife were already asleep when the Islamists arrived. Others in the house included the devout couple's two-year-old son Mosche, a nanny and three other Jews. The nanny and one of the Jews escaped and hid in a storage room. After 12 hours in the hiding place, she heard the Holtzberg's young son crying.
The nanny ventured out and saw Mosche standing next to his parents, who were lying motionless in pools of blood. She grabbed the little boy and ran out of the building.
Later on, a special unit used a helicopter to storm the Chabad House and shot two terrorists. By then, the hostages had all been killed, most of them with their hands tied.
In the period following the attack on the Chabad House, several news agencies and newspapers in Mumbai received an e-mail in which a group calling itself the "Deccan Mujaheddin" claimed responsibility for the attacks. No one had ever heard of the group.
'You Have Wronged Us'
That night, a terrorist holed up in the Hotel Oberoi gave a telephone interview to the Indian broadcaster India TV, in which he demanded the immediate release of all Islamists imprisoned in India. "You have wronged us and forced us to suffer atrocities," he said, explaining that this was why he and his brothers were now willing to die as martyrs. The man, who called himself Sahadullah, spoke Punjabi with a Pakistani accent.
The reporter asked whether the Deccan Mujaheddin had ties to al-Qaida. No, the terrorist replied, al-Qaida had cut off ties with his group. How many weapons do you have left?, the journalist asked. We still have a few presents left over for you, the man replied, followed by the sound of shots being fired in the background.
The Deccan is a high plateau in southern India. But it was doubtful if a local, previously unknown terrorist organization could truly execute an operation of this magnitude without outside support. How much in the way of logistics does an attack of this nature require?
Not much, Indian security officials in Mumbai said on Thursday. Almost all of the targets were "soft targets," that is, places with little security and easy access for the assailants. The bombs, say Indian experts, were small and manageable, and the idea of arriving by sea, though clever, did not require the involvement of a large organization.
It was evident, said Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during the fighting, that the attacks were carried out by a "group based outside the country." Was it just an Indian reflex, to blame neighboring Pakistan? Or did the premier have more information than that? Singh said that he had proof to support his theory that the terrorists had come from abroad, although his government declined to say exactly what the evidence was.
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