The Mind of a Terrorist Read online

  It was 9:28 p.m. when a young German man, twenty-six-year-old Benjamin Matthijs, saw a small oval-shaped object about the size of a fist roll along the floor to his table, when it unexpectedly made a small jump and rolled off to the right, under the neighboring table where a rugged-looking British man was eating his dinner.

  I shouldn’t be here right now. Something is very wrong. There shouldn’t be a hand grenade in a café, Benjamin managed to think as he reached for his bag.

  In the next second, the windows of the café were blown out with a deafening bang.

  The explosion left a hole in the floor more than an inch deep, and shrapnel flew through the air, killing several people and boring into Benjamin’s leg, foot, and face. He was thrown through the air and landed on the floor four or five yards from his seat, nearly at the other end of the café.

  Jesper responded instinctively.

  That’s an explosion. And this is terrorism, was his immediate thought.

  A few years earlier, he and Gitte had been on vacation in Bali. An American tourist had recommended a good restaurant that sounded like a romantic place with a view, but it just happened that they never made it there. The day after they returned home, the restaurant was bombed, and at least twenty people were killed.

  That had left a strong impression on both of them.

  But Jesper Bornak had military experience. He had been with the Danish forces in Croatia in 1995, where two of his comrades were killed and fourteen injured in a Serbian artillery attack. Jesper was familiar with explosives and had no doubt that the explosion in the café was a controlled one. And thus, most likely a terrorist attack.

  Suicide bomb, he thought, instinctively pushing his chair back and throwing himself under the table in case there was another explosion.

  Opposite Jesper sat Desiree, the stewardess he had been speaking to just seconds before. He took hold of her legs with both hands and dragged her to cover under the table.

  She was screaming loudly. For Desiree had seen what Jesper could not, since he had been sitting with his back to the door: a young man with a backpack, in dark clothing, a tight scarf, and with a raised firearm was shooting indiscriminately around the room.

  It was either Nazir or Arshad entering the café.

  From his cover under the table, Jesper heard several screams and the noise of chairs being overturned and glass breaking. People falling to the ground. The smell of gunpowder was inescapable.

  The central railway station in Mumbai, Victoria Terminus, also called Chatrapati Shivaji, is constantly teeming with people.

  That Wednesday evening was no exception, with the station filled with travelers returning from weddings, workers on their way home to Mumbai’s huge suburbs, and Muslim men still in transit from celebrating Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, a few weeks earlier. Two million passengers either board or disembark there from more than 1,200 trains every day.

  In the crowd stood two young men with large backpacks, looking like travelers among so many others.

  Ismail was the most eye-catching of the two. He was twenty-five years old, tall, and, with his background and experience in Pakistan’s northwestern border province, the natural leader for the ten terrorists who had reached the shores of Mumbai just a short while ago.

  At his side was his polar opposite: the short, dark-haired twenty-one-year-old Mohammed Ajmal Amir, who would become known as “Kasab,” Urdu for “butcher.” Kasab came from Faridkot in the Okara district of Pakistan’s Punjab province—a small, isolated rural town with only 478 registered voters and an autocratic mayor who issued orders to the inhabitants by means of the loudspeakers in the city mosque.

  GO FOR JIHAD, GO FOR JIHAD, said a large sign right outside of Faridkot.

  Kasab, though, didn’t take the direct route to jihad.

  A few years earlier, he often bickered with his poor parents, Amir Shahban and Noor Elahi, and he apparently left home after an argument about some clothing. Kasab found the world outside Faridkot disheartening, though. He could find nothing but difficult, underpaid work and all his efforts met with resistance. He was a young man with too much energy in his body, but without the means to make good use of it.

  To make money, he fell into a criminal career: first with a bit of theft, some break-ins, and then armed robberies.

  One day, Kasab met a group of Muslim men on the street. They offered to change his life, make him wiser, and free him from everyday misery. They had him watch movies and look at pictures of violent attacks and murders of Muslims all over the world, many of them in the disputed Kashmir region between Pakistan and India. Right around the corner.

  Perhaps this was indoctrination, but Kasab was a willing student. He longed for meaning in his life, and here he had found it.

  In the following months, Kasab arrived in some of the world’s most secret and most feared terrorist camps hidden in the mountains in northern Pakistan. There he was trained in close-quarters combat, the making and use of bombs, swimming, and willpower. And it was there that he was carefully selected to be among the ten who would break and humble India with the attack in Mumbai.

  In his backpack, Kasab was carrying an AK-47, six or seven magazines with thirty rounds each, a 9mm pistol with a couple magazines, eight to ten hand grenades, a water bottle, and about five pounds of nuts and dried fruits. He was ready.

  The two men entered the station’s restrooms together and then returned to the busiest area near line thirteen. At 9:53 p.m., they took their weapons out of their backpacks.

  An Indian woman was one of their first victims. She was struck in the head by bullets and fell on the floor, while her husband took the family’s children behind a post, where they hid and pretended to be dead.

  Bullets and explosions from the hand grenades filled the large building in seconds. When a thirteen-year-old Indian boy by the name of Afroz Ansari regained consciousness, he was in the local hospital. It wasn’t until several days later that he came to learn that his father, mother, uncle, two of his cousins, and his brother-in-law had been killed in the attack.

  Kasab and Ismail showed no sign of fear. They behaved like children playing a computer game, just firing away and stopping only to reload their AK-47s with fresh ammunition.

  A man yelled a few words to an elderly Muslim Indian scholar. When the attackers heard him yell, he was shot on the spot. A baby on the ground began to cry. When his mother went to pick him up, she too was shot.

  Somewhere between fifteen and twenty officers were stationed outside the station, but none of them dared to intervene.

  “We froze up. We just stood there, petrified,” as policeman Sudahm Pandakar later said. When he and his colleagues finally began their counterattack, Pandakar was equipped with only an old rifle with five rounds in it, and it didn’t even work.

  Others had wooden batons as their only weapons.

  Pandakar was struck in the ribs, while his colleagues, Abmadas Pawar and Shashank Shinde, were killed then and there.

  The firefights lasted barely an hour before Kasab and Ismail left Victoria Terminus on foot, running out onto the street where they shot officers and random passersby in the dark.

  At this point, they had already killed more than fifty. Several of the hundred plus who were injured at the train station later died of their wounds.

  Desiree lay underneath Jesper, who had draped himself over her to protect her. Seeking cover, the steward Thomas had then thrown himself on top of Jesper. They lay under the table in a heap. Completely still.

  Jesper lay with his head against the wall; he couldn’t see much in the café. So he listened intently. And every time Desiree made the slightest sound, Jesper squeezed her side to get her to be quiet.

  It was now completely silent in Leopold Café. No screams, no moans, no yells.

  There’s something very wrong, thought Jesper.

  He could hear glass breaking under boots. Tables suddenly being yanked aside. And then came the gunfire. Jesper recognized the
sound of automatic weapons fire from his time in Croatia. Two or three shots to make sure the victims were dead, but no more, in order to save ammunition. And then on to the next body. It was every bit a military operation.

  Yelling in a language unknown to Jesper could be heard in the room, but the voices were cold and devoid of excitement or fear. It sounded like commands between soldiers.

  There must be at least two men, thought Jesper, as the sound of boots on broken glass came closer.

  We’ll be shot now. I’ve got one on top of me, and I have my head against the wall, so I’ll either be shot in the legs or my lower body. If I can avoid being shot in the head, I can survive. I actually have a chance to survive, thought Jesper as he tensed his abdomen.

  And then shots rang out once again.

  The exact sequence of events at the Café Leopold is still uncertain, but most of what we know seems to indicate that it was these shots that struck the Indian woman Meetu, who had been sitting near Jesper at the adjacent table, in the back of the head.

  The Norwegian woman, Line, lay hiding on the ground holding the hand of twenty-six-year-old Meetu when it happened. She remembers her friend’s hand giving a quick jerk before going completely limp. Meetu died instantly.

  Meetu had written on Facebook a short time earlier: “Looking forward to meeting Line and Arne. It’s gonna be wonderful!”

  Line’s husband, Arne, was bleeding from his head. He’d raised his hand in front of his face when shots were fired at him a few minutes earlier, and miraculously, the rounds had grazed his forehead and nose without killing him. The shot had broken three of his fingers. There was blood everywhere.

  The terrorists had reached the door to the kitchen in their sweep to make sure that everyone in their way was either already dead or would be killed now.

  “Run! Run!”

  Jesper heard the words in his head as if they were spoken in English, but it was likely the German steward Thomas yelling, “Raus! Raus!” Regardless, Jesper knew his life would be determined by what happened in the next few seconds.

  He leaped up with the six from Lufthansa. Several of them had bloodied hair and faces, but all of them were able to run.

  On his way out, Jesper stepped over several lifeless bodies. His brain wouldn’t allow him to see them properly, so he registered only that there were corpses in front of him. Outside the café, an Indian man sat doubled over, the front of his blue shirt drenched in the blood pouring from his stomach.

  On the normally very busy main street, Colaba Causeway, everybody else had disappeared.

  Desiree ran to the right, along with three of the other Lufthansa stewardesses. Thomas and Rita ran off instinctively to the left. There was no time to gather the group together or agree on a direction.

  Jesper followed Thomas and Rita to the left quickly. His legs ran as fast as they possibly could. Past deserted stands, men’s clothing stores, and empty cars. They stopped at a street corner and looked at each other.

  “Are you okay?” they all asked each other, as they simultaneously nodded and shook their heads. They could hear the sound of gunshots, but they didn’t know where it was coming from.

  Then they gave each other a good hug.

  An hour and a half earlier, Jesper hadn’t even known that Thomas and Rita so much as existed. Now he was so happy they weren’t among the eleven dead and twenty-eight injured lying on the café floor.

  Meanwhile, the two terrorists, Nazir and Arshad, trotted out of the Leopold Café and continued to the next part of their mission on foot.

  That evening in November, more than a thousand guests were in the hotel rooms and restaurants at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Mumbai’s finest and most famous hotel. Twenty of them were killed in a few minutes, when the barely twenty-year-old Soheb and his age-mate Abu Ali began their part of the attack.

  The young men were firing with such abandon that they nearly killed Nazir and Arshad when the two arrived from Leopold a few minutes later.

  Now, the four terrorists were gathered at the hotel, the main target of the attack.

  On the sixth floor, the men went room to room, questioning the hotel guests with their weapons raised and asking those with a British or American passport to identify themselves. Those who did were either shot immediately or taken hostage.

  As the initial assault came to an end, the men took out their phones and called a preprogrammed number.

  “Pile up the carpets and mattresses from the room you’ve opened. Douse them with alcohol and set them alight. Get a couple of floors burning. And when we ring, make sure you answer,” said a voice almost five hundred miles away.

  “Yeah, yeah,” they answered.

  The phone rang again later.

  “Peace be with you.”

  “How are you getting on? Have you started the fire yet?”

  “No, we haven’t started it yet.”

  “You must start the fire now. Nothing’s going to happen until you start the fire. When people see the flames, they’ll start to be afraid. And throw some grenades, my brother. There’s no harm in throwing a few grenades. How hard can it be to throw a grenade? Just pull the pin and throw it.”

  Despite having killed so freely just moments ago, the men had a difficult time focusing on the task.

  “There is so much light in here. So many buttons. There are computers with thirty-inch screens!” they said on the call back home to Pakistan.

  This was the first time the young men had been to a foreign country. None had ever been around so much luxury in their lives. They came from some of the poorest conditions in the world. Before today, only a few of them had experienced anything other than their hometowns, where only the mayor or the local businessman might have a fancy car. Nothing like one of the world’s most beautiful hotels.

  “Computers? Haven’t you set fire to them?”

  “We’re just about to. You’ll be able to see the fire any minute.”

  “We can’t watch if there aren’t any flames. Where are they?”

  “The entrance to this room is fantastic. The mirrors are really grand. The doors are massive too. It’s fabulous. The windows are huge, but it feels very safe. There’s a double kitchen at the front, a bathroom and a small shop. And mirrors everywhere,” replied one of the four.

  Then came another call.

  There were still too few flames, said a man who called himself Wasi. The young men apparently couldn’t find any axes, but Wasi was well-acquainted with the hotel’s layout.

  “My brother, there will be an ax hanging next to each fire extinguisher in the hotel. On every floor in every corridor. Now you must start the fire. Nothing will happen until you start the fire. When people see the flames, it will cause fear outside.”

  Wasi then asked if the men had set fire to the rooms they’d ransacked.

  “No, they’re right next to each other. We’ll set the fire on our way out. We don’t want the fire to spread too quickly in case we can’t get out.”

  “No, burn everything as you go along. The bigger the fire, the more pressure you will bring to bear. We’re watching it on TV. If you start the fire it will put pressure on the security forces. They won’t come up.”

  “Listen. We don’t even walk around our own houses as freely as we do here. We own the third, fourth, and fifth floors, thanks be to God.”

  “Start the fire, my brother. Start a proper fire, that’s the important thing.”

  The men searched for guests to execute. The doors to more rooms were kicked in; women and men alike were put through painful humiliations before finally being shot. Their naked corpses were later found in contorted positions.

  Several seem to have been tortured, for example by shooting them in the genitals.

  After some time, in the various rooms where the door had been kicked in, the carpets were soaked with alcohol and were set on fire.

  Taj—as the hotel was popularly called—stood in flames. Soon Indian TV was broadcasting images of the smoke-fil
led, burning icon to the whole nation, and later to most of the world.

  “My brother, yours is the most important target. The media are covering your target, the Taj Hotel, more than any other,” came the telephone message from Pakistan.

  “They’re saying that there are many, many killed and injured. They’re saying there are fifty gunmen, the whole city has been shot up. Fires are burning everywhere. People are dying all over the place. With God’s blessing, you’ve done a brilliant job!

  “You’re very close to heaven, brother. Today’s the day you’ll be remembered for, brother.”

  Jesper Bornak was keenly aware of his own heartbeat.

  In the side streets they could hear more gunfire, and the otherwise safe big city had suddenly become an inferno of fear. Everything had the potential to be a threat. Everyone had the potential to be a terrorist, ready to take a rifle out of a bag at any moment.

  Where can we find someplace safe? thought Jesper.

  They hadn’t run more than seventy or eighty yards from Leopold Café down Colaba Causeway.

  A burly, balding Indian man in his forties appeared in a small doorway.

  “Come in here,” he said in broken English. “Come now, come now.”

  Jesper and Thomas and Rita from Lufthansa looked at each other, reached a quick decision, and ran after the man toward a rear stairway that smelled of urine. The man’s apartment consisted of two rooms: one with bunk beds built from some planks, worn-out mattresses, and a washbasin. In the other room, there were mattresses spread out on the floor, a burner, a refrigerator, and a television. An old woman sat on the floor with a large group of terrified children around her.

  Jesper quickly began to inspect the apartment.

  If the terrorists come up here, how will we get out? he asked himself.

  He found a small hole in the wall where he could see down to the street. The street was still completely empty. Everyone was hiding.

  Normally, Jesper charged his mobile phone only at night, but that day he had put his Nokia in the charger while he made a foray down to the hotel pool. It was pure luck that he now had tons of battery life.