There is already a lot of info on this event
this is a longish article with some curious
insights......
Mumbai attacks more complicated than corporate press reports
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Dec 3, 2008, 00:24
(WMR) -- As first reported by WMR while the corporate press was uttering the “Al Qaeda” bogeyman as likely behind the terror attacks on Mumbai, the Press Trust of India (PTI) is now confirming WMR’s initial report that Pakistan- and Dubai-based criminal syndicate boss Dawood Ibrahim’s gangsters handed over the weapons and explosive material to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) terrorists to carry out the assault on targets in Mumbai.
According to PTI, one LET terrorist captured by India, Ajmal Qasab, said he and his fellow terrorists sailed from Karachi and entered Mumbai’s port area with the help of Ibrahim’s agents who run several customs facilities in Mumbai. However, there are some questions being raised about Qasab and his claims. The so-called security camera shot of Qasab, who is being billed by the media as the “lone surviving gunman,” at Chatrapathi Sivaji train terminal in Mumbai, appears fake. The angle is too narrow for a train station which would have a wider angle and be shot from higher up than the photo being shopped by the Indian police. However, according to Asian intelligence sources, Qasab may have been trained by Hindu militants and was rushed to the scene of the attack for a photo opportunity hastily arranged by the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) propaganda team. One Asian intelligence source who has spent a great deal of time in Pakistan reports that he has “never seen a haircut like his [Qasab’s] in Pakistan or on either side of Line of Control in Kashmir.” He also pointed out that Qasab is a bit overweight for an average “mujad” who slim down in training by exercising and eating a sparse diet of lentils and flat bread.
An abandoned Indian fishing boat, the Kuber, discovered off the coast of Mumbai, was found to contain satellite phones and global positioning system (GPS) equipment pre-programmed with a return route to Karachi, Pakistan. The Ibrahim gangsters and LET terrorists had hijacked the Kuber and killed its crew.
It has also been revealed that the Trident-Oberoi Hotel had been chosen by the terrorists because a large number of Israeli businessmen were staying there while attending a diamond exhibition. WMR has learned from our Asian intelligence sources that a large number of Mossad officers used the Trident-Oberoii as a base of operations, along with the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Chabad House, which was also targeted by the terrorist-gangster alliance.
The Oberoi hostages were shot in the back of their heads, a typical gangland execution method preferred by Ibrahim and not the firing squad method used by LET. The outbreak of fires in rooms at the Oberoi also point to the possibility that the hotel was being used by British, American (possibly Defense Intelligence Agency), Australian, and Israeli non-official cover (NOC) agents as a base and documents were being destroyed before the hotel was fully secured by the Ibrahim-LET assailants. There was an initial report that a number of bodies of white males brought out of the Oberoi were Australians.
A report in Kashmir Times, since removed from its website, claimed that the terrorists that entered the Taj Mahal Palace hotel had identified two senior U.S. intelligence officers in the crowd. The fact that the two CIA agents were singled out lends more proof to WMR’s original report that Ibrahim was retaliating against his old CIA friends because he suspected them of working with India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency to extradite him from his sanctuary in Quetta, Pakistan, to India. Ibrahim is a veteran of CIA “off-the-books” operations during the mujahedin war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and currently in CIA drug and weapons smuggling and money laundering activities in South Asia, particularly in facilitating the shipment of a bumper crop of opium from U.S.-occupied Afghanistan to enrich the coffers of CIA slush funds.
Ibrahim was also involved in supplying nuclear materials to Pakistan’s father of the nuclear bomb, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan has made no secret that the CIA was well aware of his activities and Ibrahim may be in a position to know much more about the secret networks that supplied Pakistan with proscribed materials, including nuclear-related and missile items, networks that may involve CIA channels and Turkish and Israeli criminal intermediaries.
The fate of the two CIA agents at the Taj, which was apparently being used by the CIA as an operational base, is unknown. Ibrahim’s targeting of Britons was a message sent to British MI-6 assets in ISI not to cooperate with the Americans and Indians in double-crossing Ibrahim by arranging a quick extradition “flight” from Pakistan to India.
However, Ibrahim, before he became a target for the United States, was keenly avoided by U.S. officials in connection with terrorist acts. On July 11, 2006, when Mumbai was struck by a series of deadly train bombings that killed over 200 people (the so-called “7/11” bombings), Assistant Secretary of State for Central and South Asian Affairs Richard Boucher was careful not to assign blame to Ibrahim. Boucher said, “Dawood Ibrahim is indeed on our list. We do think he was responsible for some of the previous crimes. I don’t know personally if he is responsible for this one or not . . .”
India is trying to boost the LET’s involvement in the Mumbai attacks while downplaying the role of Ibrahim. However, WMR has learned that LET was a mere subcontractor to Ibrahim’s criminal syndicate in order to send a message to Delhi, Washington, and London that he will not be bartered away in a side deal with Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s tainted widower, who is a business rival of Ibrahim in Pakistan. Zardari has made no secret of his dislike of Ibrahim, especially since the Indian expat son of a Mumbai Criminal Branch police constable is so powerful in Pakistan he is known as the “King of Karachi.”
The Indian government realizes that Ibrahim has catered for some time to India’s wealthy elite, including the nouveau riche of “Bollywood,” India’s movie-making mecca. He has served as pimp, drug dealer, moneylender at casinos (including the casinos in Kathmandu Ibrahim runs jointly with CIA assets), hitman, extortionist, import and export fixer, cop briber at amazingly reasonable fees via deals disguised as legitimate business contracts. In 1997, Ibrahim was accused of the contract murder of well-known Bollywood filmmaker Gulshan Kumar. One of Kumar’s Bollywood rivals was accused of ordering the hit on Kumar.
Ibrahim’s network in Bihar facilitates lucrative gold smuggling in and out of neighboring Nepal, a gold smuggling network that ultimately leads to Ibrahim’s gold smuggling operations in Dubai. Ibrahim also runs a lucrative gold and weapons smuggling operation in Gujarat. The Ibrahim gold smuggling operations in Dubai also mask British intelligence money laundering operations in the Caribbean and Isle of Man -- and this intelligence has been captured by National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance of both financial transactions and the reported compromise of encrypted British TOP SECRET UK EYES ONLY communications by NSA.
Ibrahim sent a lesson to Britain based on history. The weapons smuggled by Ibrahim’s men and the LET into Mumbai came through the customs house on Sassoon Dock and transferred to fast inflatable boats that landed at the Gate of India, the old British East India Company’s trade passage into India. The lucrative Indian drug trade conducted through Mumbai has been divided between Ibrahim’s Muslim gangs and the relatively new arrivals, the Russian-Israeli Mafia. The Indian drug business is largely run out of London and there has even been some cooperation between the Russian-Israeli mob and Ibrahim’s gangsters by divvying up stolen Nokia mobile phones --hijacked during the shipment process -- that are used to coordinate the drug and weapons smuggling trade.
However, WMR has learned from Asian intelligence sources that the Russian-Israeli gangsters operating out of Chabad House tried to take over Mumbai’s drug trade with the help of local Jewish mobsters so Ibrahim, while settling scores with India, the CIA, and Britain, decided to have his subcontractor LET terrorists pay a visit to Chabad House and “collect on a debt with high interest.” Ibrahim has always been careful to kill more criminals than he employs and after his attacks on Hindu and Israeli mobsters in Mumbai, the ratio has reportedly gotten better. Ibrahim eliminated practically every one of his criminal rivals in Mumbai during the 1980s and he is not about to see Hindu and Israeli crime syndicates replace him in his fiercely fought-for turf in Mumbai and other parts of India. Ibrahim’s drug and other smuggling operations in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Africa, and Sri Lanka have also faced new and increased competition from Russian-Israeli gangsters operating in the same regions.
In March 1993, Ibrahim launched a deadly series of car bombings in Mumbai that, like the recent attacks, were dual purpose: Ibrahim got his revenge for a Hindu massacre of Muslims in India and he wiped out Karim Lala’s criminal network in central Mumbai, one of his last rivals in the city. Lala was once Ibrahim’s boss before Ibrahim broke away to form his own crime syndicate. The perpetrators of the attacks, possessing Indian passports, arrived in Mumbai via Pakistan with valid Pakistani visas obtained from the Pakistani consulate in Dubai. The Pakistani visas showed no Pakistan entry or exit stamps, courtesy of the ISI.
The 1993 terrorists arrived in India, like their more recent colleagues, by boat from Pakistan. Indian police found an unused detonator and timing device with an unexploded bomb used by the terrorists. The FBI confirmed that the timer was of U.S. origin and part if a CIA shipment to the ISI during the 1980s Afghan war.
Due to pressure from India and INTERPOL, Dubai pressured Ibrahim into leaving the emirate in 1994. He took up residence in Karachi and often traveled to Nepal. In 2003, Iqbal Kaskar, Ibrahim’s brother, and Ibrahim’s lieutenant, Ejaz Pathan, were extradited by the United Arab Emirates to India for their roles in the 1993 Mumbai attacks.
There is also evidence that right-wing Hindu elements of the RAW were aware of Ibrahim’s hit on Mumbai beforehand but allowed it to play out in order to carry out a “soft coup” by right-wing Hindu nationalists against the Indian Congress government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The Hindu nationalists are allied through lucrative business ties with prospective U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Hindu nationalists are hoping for a showdown with Pakistan and a confrontation with China. The Hindu right-wingers are also supported by the Israeli criminal and intelligence network in India.
Ibrahim and his friends in ISI may have been sending a clear message to the billionaire Tata family that owns the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. The Tatas stand to make a handsome profit from the recent U.S.-nuclear deal and the fact that the Tatas are Parsees -- fire worshippers -- prompted Ibrahim to order his men to burn down the Taj Mahal hotel.
The first police official who uncovered the soft coup in New Delhi by the Hindu right-wingers was Hemant Karkare, the anti-terrorism chief of the Mumbai police. Karkare was the first target when the attacks in Mumbai began, but it is certain that his knowledge of ties between Hindu terrorists and Indian RAW intelligence in carrying out “false flag” attacks later blamed on Muslims likely earned Karkare a death sentence from the Hindus and their RAW friends. One of the terrorists caught on CCTV at the Mumbai train station was seen wearing an orange wristband, which is commonly worn by Hindu fundamentalists.
And Ibrahim has his own connections with India’s extremist Hindus. Ibrahim’s influence over and fascination with Bollywood has resulted in a friendly relationship between the “King of Karachi” and the actor-turned-Hindu extremist, Hindu Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray, who has been accused of involvement in terrorist violence against Indian Muslims. Shiv Sena is connected to a gangland rival of Ibrahim’s, one of Ibrahim’s former aides, Chotta Rajan. Rajan split with Ibrahim after the 1993 Mumbai attacks.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2008 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
