By SPIEGEL Staff
Some signs seemed to point in a completely different direction -- inward. There is plenty of anger and hate to go around among India's Muslims, just as there are plenty of men within that group who idolize al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
The decades-long good relationship between the Muslim minority and the Indian state was severely shaken in 2002, when a Hindu mob hunted down and killed about 2,000 Muslims in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Meanwhile, the international politicization of Islam has not gone unnoticed among Indian Muslims. In response to the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005, radical Muslims staged angry protests in India. And not every terrorist arrested by Indian security forces has completed his training in Pakistani or Afghan camps. There are also terrorist training camps in the forests of the southwest Indian province of Kerala and in central India.
One of the gunmen who paralyzed Mumbai.
In November 2007, the Indian Mujaheddin claimed responsibility for its first attacks -- in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Since then, it has also claimed responsibility for a number of attacks in recent months, killing 130 people this year. For the Islamists, the Indian Mujaheddin is battling the government to exact revenge for the persecution of Muslims in India.
In its hate-filled September e-mail, the group announced attacks in Mumbai: "As deadly as the attacks facing residents of Mumbai will be, the only elements responsible for this are the members of the Mumbai counterterrorism unit." The special force is considered violent in its treatment of Islamists. In their e-mail, the terrorists wrote that the names of police officers responsible for the violence were on a death list, and that this time they were very serious.
Shortly after the first shots were fired in the Taj Mahal Hotel on Wednesday evening, hotel security personnel ran into the restaurant. "Quick, quick," they shouted, herding the guests into the kitchen. "Then we hid, as well as we could," says German member of parliament Erika Mann, "always moving from one spot to the next, constantly fleeing." Next to her she saw Indians, Japanese and Arabs running for their lives. "There was one woman who was screaming horribly," says the politician, "she had been forced to leave her two babies behind in the lobby."
Mann and others ran down a spiral staircase into underground hallways. "There were shots behind us," says Mann. But eventually she ran into soldiers who were apparently shooting at the attackers behind her, and after that she was safe.
Unlike Mann, Andreas Liveras, the frozen pastry multimillionaire, never made it to safety with the soldiers. He was found dead later on, with several bullets in his body.
Traumatic History
Instead of following the rest of the group out of the restaurant, Ralph Burkei, the man from Munich, tried to climb down the outside of the hotel. He fell and landed on an awning. He must have been in terrible pain, but he was still alive when he used his mobile phone to call a friend in Munich. "I've broken all of my bones," he said. "Unless someone helps me now, I won't make it."
Burkei called his friend several times that night. But help did not arrive at the awning soon enough to save his life.
The attack on Mumbai has finally turned the world's attention to a region that has always seethed with violence, one in which murders of politicians occur periodically and where terror is practically part of daily life.
When Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru led India to independence in 1947, the British colonial power ordered the division of the subcontinent into two nations, the Union of India and the much smaller Islamic Republic of Pakistan, from which East Pakistan seceded in 1971 to become an independent state, Bangladesh.
The announcement, on the day after independence, of the location of the new border marked the beginning of a conflict that expanded into the second ongoing international political crisis, next to the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, brought on by the disintegration of the British Empire: the struggle between warring brothers, Pakistan and India. It was this same struggle that led to the Mumbai massacre.
It began with an ethnic cleansing campaign of previously unknown proportions, in which 5.5 million Hindus and Sikhs were drive south and about six million Muslims north across the new border. Pogroms erupted in villages, neighbors attacked neighbors and almost a million people lost their lives at the hands of violent, fanatical religious warriors. Since its bloody beginnings Pakistan has been plagued by the fear of being swallowed up by its much larger neighbor.
A constantly bleeding wound in this conflict between neighbors is the crisis over one of the most beautiful parts of the world, the Himalayan region of Kashmir. At the time of independence Kashmir, a former princely state, was ruled by a Hindu maharaja, despite the fact that it was 80 percent Muslim. Pakistan, eager to annex Kashmir, sent in Muslim irregular troops. The beleaguered maharaja turned to New Delhi for help and surrendered his realm to the Union of India, which also sent soldiers.
Since early 1949, Kashmir has been split along a United Nations-brokered ceasefire line. India and Pakistan have already waged two bloody wars over Kashmir and threatened each other with nuclear annihilation. Former US President Bill Clinton called the paradisiacal region "the most dangerous place on earth."
The Pakistani military believed it had a good opportunity to weaken India when, in 1989, a rebellion broke out among Muslims in the Indian part of Kashmir. The Pakistan intelligence agency, ISI, invited young Kashmiris to cross the border for training, only to send them back as trained fighters. India brutally struck down the rebellion.
In response, the ISI changed course. From then on, the intelligence agency no longer used primarily Kashmiri nationalists, but Pakistani and Kashmiri Islamists, who invoked jihad against India and sought to "Islamize" Kashmir. After having given the al-Qaida terrorists their start by supporting the fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis paved the way for Islamist terrorists to head south.
Even al-Qaida leader Bin Laden had close ties to Kashmiri terrorism. In a new book, former CIA agent Bruce Riedel, now an advisor to US President-elect Barack Obama, describes how Bin Laden and the ISI cooperated in the establishment of the Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has since expanded its attacks well beyond Kashmir to strike India directly.
Three months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a suicide commando attacked the Indian parliament. The incident almost sparked a war between India and Pakistan, because the government in New Delhi saw the handwriting of Pakistani intelligence in the attack. It was only through pressure from Washington that a new war was prevented.
It is precisely those terrorists who apparently almost triggered a nuclear war at the time who the Indians now believe are behind the attacks on Mumbai.
The Pakistan Connection
If it turns out that the terrorists did in fact come from Pakistan, the world will face a new round in the dangerous dispute between the two archenemies. The conflict harbors the risks of a war between the two nuclear powers, which explains why Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has been so eager to show a willingness to cooperate. He is sending his foreign minister to meet with Singh and his intelligence chief and his staff to India to assist in the investigation.
Even before the hours of horror in Mumbai had ended, Indian authorities apparently found evidence of a connection between the attackers and the Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba.
As the Indian special forces units advanced through the hotels, room by room, they witnessed grisly scenes, liberated the Islamists' hostages and shot one attacker after another. One terrorist at the Taj Mahal managed to hold out until the end.
"There were bodies lying all over the place, and there was blood everywhere," says one officer, describing the scenes when the Indian authorities stormed the hotel. They counted 50 dead in the lobby alone, and more bodies in a room on the third floor. They also discovered the Islamists' supplies: dates, almonds and bullet rounds. The attackers had apparently prepared for a prolonged siege.
While freeing the hostages, the Indian special units also captured at least one of the terrorists alive. At first the media reported three captured gunmen. On Friday the PTI news agency reported that they had confessed that they were members of Lashkar-e Taiba, or "Army of the Pure."
On Friday evening, the British Daily Mail newspaper reported that at least two of the men arrested were British citizens of Pakistani descent. Scotland Yard sent a team to Mumbai to help Indian investigators. However, the British connection seemed to be discounted over the weekend.
According to the latest media reports, there is one Islamist in police custody, a 21-year-old Pakistani named as Ajmal Qasab who says he was trained in Lashkar camps.
And Indian intelligence is claiming that the attackers, using satellite phones, spoke with men in Pakistan during the gun battles, even speaking directly with a Lashkar commander.
RÜDIGER FALKSOHN, CLEMENS HÖGES, HANS HOYNG, JULIANE VON MITTELSTAEDT, PADMA RAO, BRITTA SANDBERG, HANS-JÜRGEN SCHLAMP, BERNHARD ZAND
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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© DER SPIEGEL 49/2008
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