It is unlikely that Muhammad Ajmal Kasab drew a second glance from onlookers when he walked into Mumbai’s historic Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station a little after 9 p.m. on Nov. 26. The 21-year-old man’s upper body was heavily muscled, but his clean-shaven face was broad and youthful, softened by the remnants of baby fat. He wore sneakers, a pink wristband, baggy cargo pants and a T-shirt with a Versace designer label across the chest. With a blue backpack slung across his shoulder, he looked like a typical college student enjoying a bit of carefree travel—perhaps on his way to Goa, a favourite destination a little further down the coast.
But in his backpack, in addition to dried fruit and a mobile phone, Kasab carried grenades and ammunition magazines for the AK-47 assault rifle he had managed to conceal as well. When he reached crowded platform 13, Kasab and his partner Ismail Khan began shooting indiscriminately at commuters and diners in the train station café. The crowd panicked and those who could, fled. One of two police at the station tried to return fire while hiding in an alcove, but he was armed with a Second World War-era rifle and was forced to scramble for shelter while Kasab and Khan blazed away from their hips with automatic weapons.
The pair left the station and ambushed a police van, spraying it with gunfire and dumping the bodies of the slain officers on the road, one of whom was the anti-terrorism squad chief Hemant Karkare. Unknown to them, two police, including Const. Arun Jadhav, were alive but wounded in the back seat. The van careened through the city, with one of the two terrorists driving and the other shooting out the window. When Jadhav’s colleague’s cellphone rang, one of the gunman turned around and shot him. The terrorists said little, joking at one point about a police officer they murdered who had been wearing a bulletproof vest. Jadhav, who had been shot three times, was unable to reach his weapon. “I wish I could have lifted my gun,” he would later say from his hospital bed.
When one of the van’s tires went flat, Kasab and Khan abandoned the vehicle and hijacked another car. Police intercepted the pair and shot Khan dead. An enraged crowd at the scene descended on Kasab, kicking and thrashing him with sticks before police intervened and saved him. Here, Kasab’s perverted good fortune turned. He would later tell police that he had been trained to “kill to the last breath.” Instead, Kasab was captured alive. While he initially begged medical staff to give him saline to save his life, following interrogations by police he has reportedly said, “I don’t want to live.”
But Kasab is alive and talking. He is now telling Indian investigators about the attacks, how they were planned, and who the people were who sent him and his terrorist colleagues on their mission. The picture Kasab paints is blurry and is further confused by Indian officials—perhaps numbering as many as 15—who sat in on his interrogations and are furiously leaking often inconsistent reports of what they heard to local and international media. Throw in recollections from the odd hospital volunteer who might have overheard a snippet of conversation and the story that emerges is one that will change as further evidence is compiled, and rumours and hearsay are separated from facts. For the moment, though, Kasab’s testimony—at least the version of it passed on by Indian officials crowded around his hospital bed—is the foundation for what is so far known about the atrocities in Mumbai and who was behind them.
Muhammad Ajmal Kasab’s road to infamy began over a year ago at a mountain training camp near Muzaffarabad, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The camp was run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a radical Islamist organization linked to international jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda, as well as to Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—which has long sponsored Islamist insurgent groups, including the Taliban, in both Afghanistan and Indian-administered Kashmir.
Details about Kasab’s life before arriving at the camp are vague. He is reportedly from Faridkot village in Pakistan’s Punjab province. His rural village lies in an area that is a rich recruiting ground for jihadists. He grew up poor, the son of a snack vendor, and left the village about four years ago. According to some press reports, Kasab told interrogators that his father “sold” him to a leading member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, for about $4,500. One Faridkot villager told journalist Saeed Shah that Kasab would return home about once a year and talk about “freeing” Kashmir from Indian rule.
In Muzaffarabad, Kasab met other members of the eventual team of 10 who would assault Mumbai. Some reports have it that they were selected from a larger group of 24 trainees, and that not all were initially trained at the same camp. They were reportedly given false names and discouraged from talking with each other about topics other than their mission. They were trained in the use of explosives, urban warfare, and hand-to-hand combat. At another Kashmiri camp near the massive Mangla Dam, they practised beach landings. All became extremely muscular in the course of their training. An Indian official suggested that traces of steroids were found in the blood of the slain terrorists, along with cocaine and other stimulants that allowed the 10 men to battle hundreds of Indian police and soldiers for 60 hours, apparently without sleep.
