The Mind of a Terrorist Page 3

  He dialed Jens Svendsen’s number. A childhood friend from Denmark since the two of them were boys of about twelve or thirteen years old, Jens had also been a soldier in Croatia, and he’s one of those guys you can call if your car breaks down, your girlfriend is breaking up with you, or you’re going to be a father. Or when you’re in the middle of a terrorist attack in a foreign city.

  “It’s absolutely crazy,” Jesper said on the poor connection to Denmark.

  He asked Jens to find the number for the Danish consulate in Mumbai so he could get help.

  Three thousand miles to the northwest, Jesper’s childhood friend was confused.

  “I can’t hear you well, Jesper. I’ve got some laundry to do for my parents. Can I call you back later?” Jens asked as he hung up.

  Jens didn’t think anything of it. He often heard from Jesper when he was traveling in other countries and along with that came a certain amount of experience with bad mobile phone coverage. It was still an hour before news of the attack would make it to mainstream Danish media. And several more hours and days before the attack in Mumbai was known to most everyone.

  On the way to his parents’ house, Jens received several text messages.

  “Will you call soon? It’s very important,” wrote Jesper.

  Once the laundry had been delivered to his parents’ house, Jens got hold of Jesper in Mumbai.

  “They’re firing with handguns. They’re throwing grenades.” Jens managed to understand despite the terrible connection, and he realized the seriousness of the situation.

  “Stay where you are. I’ll figure something out,” said Jens.

  It was about 10:40 p.m. when the first taxi bomb exploded without warning, causing panic in the suburb of Ville Parle, not far from the international airport in Mumbai. The taxi driver and a passenger were killed in the explosion; two others were injured.

  Among what remained of the car was the license plate, MH01G779. Some months later, it became clear that this was the airport taxi that had brought Kasab and Ismail to the train station. They had left a time bomb in the taxi. Kasab had slipped it under the driver’s seat, while Ismail had distracted the driver with conversation.

  Fifty-five-year-old Laxminarayan Goel had taken the taxi from Victoria Terminus en route to the airport, since he had arrived too late for his train to Hyderabad. It ended up costing him his life.

  As for the police, news of the bomb led initially to the arrest of the taxi’s innocent owner, while various other cars were stopped and people were either detained or arrested on the slightest suspicion.

  Everywhere, there seemed to be chaos.

  In the media, the situation wasn’t any clearer. There were reports of new explosions with exaggerated death tolls, and images of burning buildings gave the sense of one big mess.

  “Is this a terrorist attack planned by some large group? We don’t know. Was it planned by organized crime? We don’t know. What do they want? We don’t know,” recounted a journalist on one local TV station.

  The perpetrators didn’t make so much as a single demand or explain why innocent people needed to be killed.

  They simply continued their attack.

  “The enemy must fear us. When this is over, there will be much more fear in the world.”

  That was the line from Karachi in Pakistan, where everything was going according to plan in the terrorists’ control room. They could make calls to the ten terrorists—who had now formed four teams—without any problem at all and thereby control them, as if they were remote-controlled robots.

  The team consisting of Fahadullah and Rahman had taken the inflatable dinghy farther up the Mumbai coast, then headed directly to the Oberoi-Trident hotel complex. Once there, they wasted no time. In the lobby they killed all nine employees and three guests by the same method as their colleagues, hand grenades and bullets.

  Esperanza Aguirre, the president of the Spanish region of Madrid, was about to check in at the front desk as she heard shots fired. She threw herself down behind a table, then hid in the kitchen and then in a storage room before she was helped into an office. Finally, she fled, barefoot, out onto the street.

  Meanwhile, fear spread throughout the hotel. Several people crawled out windows and clung to the walls, yelling for help.

  In a sushi restaurant in the hotel, thirteen were killed. One woman was badly injured but played dead. She lay for sixteen hours before help arrived.

  The two men detonated a bomb in a tea room and dragged fifteen hotel guests out into a stairwell. Fahadullah was about to execute the men when one of the wives—Meltem Muezzinoglu—suddenly yelled, “We’re from Turkey. We’re Muslims.”

  She and her husband, Seyfi Muezzinoglu, were allowed to live. The other men were shot.

  Later, the women in the group were executed too. Among them was the twenty-eight-year-old lawyer Lo Hoei Yen from Singapore, who was in Mumbai for a day trip. She was forced up against a wall and executed.

  Out of the entire group of hotel guests taken prisoner, only Meltem and her husband survived—likely because the terrorists heard them reciting a Muslim prayer over the dead. It was the only prayer the married couple knew by heart in Arabic.

  “No kill. You brothers. Go in,” said Fahadullah to the couple.

  A good mile from the Oberoi-Trident, Kasab and Ismail were walking around on the street with their weapons raised. They had apparently gotten lost after the attack on Victoria Terminus and were now simply trying to cause as much havoc as possible.

  This was not part of the plan; they improvised.

  In several locations, they kicked doors in and killed random people. An elderly man received two cuts to his throat but escaped with his life. Another was shot and killed as he sat eating in a small shed by the side of the road.

  They jumped over a fence and made a beeline to a hospital where 450 patients and staff had recently seen the first warnings on TV that there were terrorists in the area.

  An Indian woman was in the midst of giving birth, but the doctors and nurses tried to get her to quiet down so she wouldn’t attract attention.

  She banged her head against the floor in frustration.

  “Do something! Do something!” she yelled.

  At one point, a group of police officers arrived at that Cama Hospital in a Toyota Qualis. They called for reinforcements by radio, but by that time the command structure of the Mumbai police force had effectively collapsed. Many high-ranking officers and patrolmen had gone home to protect their own families, while others hung back in defeat, not daring to go out to fight the terrorists. They had already lost too many colleagues.

  Lacking reinforcements, the officers were attacked, and three of them were immediately killed in the exchange of fire.

  Kasab and Ismail probably never discovered that one of their victims was Hemant Karkara, the leader of Mumbai’s anti-terrorism unit. His loss did nothing to help the police form a comprehensive picture of the attacks under way.

  The two terrorists proceeded to drag some of the corpses out onto the road, where they commandeered the police jeep. In the backseat lay officer Arun Jadhav, shot three times in the left shoulder and twice in the right elbow. He played dead in order to survive.

  At one point, a mobile phone rang from a pocket somewhere near Jadhav. Kasab turned toward the backseat and fired at the presumably already dead officer. By pure chance, Jadhav was not hit.

  He lay completely still.

  They drove around for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the vehicle got a flat tire. The two men then forced three women out of a Škoda Laura and continued on their way. Jadhav was nearly shot when his colleagues later surrounded the abandoned Toyota. But he survived and was able to give the first detailed description of the perpetrators. And where they were off to.

  The attack had now been in progress for a few hours.

  While the majority of the attacks that night had the purpose of drawing as much attention as possible, one attack was initially conducted in almos
t complete silence.

  In southern Mumbai there was a Jewish studies center known as Chabad—carefully concealed in a five-story building called Nariman House along with, among other things, a synagogue and a few small rooms where mainly young Israeli and American backpackers in India stayed a night before continuing on their journey to Goa or other Indian cities. There was often a sizable crowd of people in the building.

  The two young men, Akasha and Umer, were the only ones from the team on the beach who did not take a taxi that evening. Instead, they followed a precisely planned route about five hundred yards from the beach and up to exactly this building. While on the way, they placed a bomb in a gas station.

  Using their mobile phone—a simple, cheap Nokia 1200 bought in Pakistan—Akasha and Umer made contact with Karachi.

  “As I told you, every person you kill where you are is worth fifty of the ones killed elsewhere,” came the message from the other end.

  In the house, the twenty-nine-year-old rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg heard shots ring out or something suspicious that caused him to call the Israeli consulate from his mobile. He had been born in Israel, lived many years in New York, and then moved to Mumbai six years earlier to lead the five-thousand-odd Jews in the city.

  “The situation is bad,” he managed to say before the connection was cut off.

  Shortly after that, he and his pregnant wife, Rivka Holtzberg, were overwhelmed and killed by gunfire as they attempted to stop the men from entering the building. Several guests were also killed, while two were taken hostage.

  While the men slaughtered everyone around them with abandon, a young girl by the name of Sandra Samuel hid. She didn’t lock the door to her room, and that probably saved her life, as the men obviously had no reason to suspect anyone was in a room with an unlocked door. She later left the building carrying the son of the Holtzbergs, who was barely two years old and had found his parents dead on the ground. He was soaked in their blood.

  Through his childhood friend Jens, Jesper Bornak had gotten in touch with the consular service in the Danish foreign ministry. They’re the people you call if, as a Dane, you’ve been in some sort of accident while outside Denmark.

  The consular service hadn’t heard anything about an attack in India.

  “Just stay where you are,” they said.

  But Jesper didn’t feel safe in the Indian man’s apartment and went down to the street, where the first military jeeps were arriving. A police commander reached the same conclusion: “It’s not safe to remain in this area. Get back to your hotel instead and stay there.”

  None of them knew that the Oberoi-Trident—the hotel where Jesper, Rita, and Thomas were staying—had been under attack for about an hour.

  Almost at the same time the three left for the hotel in a taxi, another taxi exploded in Mumbai’s Wadi Bunder district. Three were killed and fifteen were injured.

  At the Oberoi-Trident, Jesper saw smoke, and now there was a checkpoint that prevented them from going further.

  “Leave. The hotel has been attacked. There are terrorists on the street. It’s not safe to be here. Head that way,” said a soldier in English, pointing toward a park where several hotel guests had gathered.

  Not on my life, thought Jesper. If the terrorists come storming out of the hotel, they’ll attack any place where a lot of people have gathered. I just need to get away.

  The three ran down a street that went along the hotel, where a TV crew from the local CNN station, IBN, stopped them.

  “What’s happened? Have you seen anything?” the journalists asked, still having a hard time keeping track of which places had actually been under attack.

  Jesper and Thomas explained to the camera about the attack on Leopold. How they got away. And how they now feared for their lives.

  A car drove quickly toward them, and some soldiers raised their weapons. It was a false alarm. But it did nothing to ease the state of paranoia that Jesper was in—everything was a threat, everything was dangerous, and everyone was a terrorist. If he wasn’t safe at one of the most distinguished hotels in the city, if he wasn’t safe in a taxi, if he wasn’t safe on the street—what could he do?

  He was about out of ideas and energy. And his cell phone battery was almost dead.

  For the first time, it dawned on Jesper that he needed to get hold of his wife, Gitte, at home in Denmark. He had the feeling he might not survive the night.

  * * *

  It was a little after midnight when the silver-gray Škoda containing Kasab and Ismail reached a police barricade near the popular beach area, Girgaum Chaupati. Ismail tried to turn the car around but ran right into the barricade.

  Kasab stepped out of the car as if to surrender and apparently raised his hands in the air. But as the officers approached him, he raised his AK-47.

  The forty-eight-year-old officer Tukaram Omble, who had followed the Škoda on his motorcycle, made a split-second fatal decision: he grabbed hold of Kasab’s weapon with both hands as Kasab emptied the magazine.

  More than twenty rounds ended up in Omble’s stomach, but even as Omble collapsed he managed to keep his hold on the gun and thereby prevent Kasab from killing others. The other officers shot Ismail several times. He later died on the way to a local hospital.

  Kasab was arrested alive, though the officers wanted more than anything to beat him to death right then and there.

  “When we saw that Omble was not letting go of the terrorist’s gun, we knew we could not let his sacrifice go in vain. He held on and we completed his unfinished task,” one of the officers, Sanjay Govilkar, later explained.

  Scared, bruised, and injured, Kasab was interrogated later that night on a flat hospital mattress with a thin, gray blanket over him, in front of rolling cameras. The attacks throughout the city were still in progress, and the investigators were keen to obtain any information that could stop the killings.

  But they were also intensely interested in Kasab’s story. How did he get here? Who had sent him? And why?

  Kasab claimed it was because his father, a poor food merchant from Faridkot in Pakistan, had sold him to some men: “He said, ‘These people make loads of money, and so will you. You don’t have to do anything difficult. We’ll have money. We wouldn’t be poor anymore. Your brothers and sisters can get married. Look at these guys living the good life. You can be like them,’” Kasab quoted his father as saying, his voice trembling.

  According to the agreement, Kasab’s father would receive $1,250 if Kasab were to die as a martyr in battle against the infidel Indian forces.

  But that part of the plan had failed. Not only was Kasab alive, but he had been captured by the enemy.

  “We were all supposed to die. He said we would go to heaven,” cried Kasab, who more than anything else seemed like a little boy as he lay surrounded by the gruff soldiers gathered around his hospital bed.

  The young man denied knowing anything in particular about jihad, the Muslim holy war. This wasn’t his own personal war, but a war he carried out for a holy man, explained Kasab.

  After more than a half hour of interrogation, though, Kasab was ready to reveal the name of the organization that had sent him from his rural town in Pakistan to India, to become a mass murderer.

  “They’re called Lakshar-e-Taiba,” said Kasab.

  The army of the righteous.

  In a house in a certain residential district of Lahore, Pakistan, a mobile phone vibrated at some point that evening.

  “Turn on your TV,” said the screen.

  The man in the house needed nothing more. Before his hands found the remote control, he knew what was under way in Mumbai, close to a thousand miles away.

  Kasab, Ismail, Javed, Shoaib, Nazir, Arshad, Umar, Akasha, Rahman, and Fahadullah must have reached land and managed their initial challenges, and now they were carrying out their lives’ most important task. Their final mission.

  Allah was great, he was all-powerful, and he was with those ten young men that evening.

&
nbsp; David Headley felt he had waited an incredibly long time for this day. Like a photographer who has come home after a long trip, standing in a darkroom and waiting to see his best pictures from the adventure emerge from the developing solution. Excited and hoping that everything will come out as anticipated.

  In his dreams, he had envisioned the young men firing wildly; he had heard the screams and tasted satisfaction and pride. Now, those same images would be foisted on the rest of the world.

  He had also dreamed of boats capsizing en route, of giving himself away and revealing his mission before it even started. The difference between success and disaster was a matter of inches.

  If Mumbai was a success, if everything went according to plan, it would be to his profit. No, he didn’t have a weapon in his hands like the ten men at Mumbai’s premier hotels. It wasn’t him doing the killing. But he had created their actions. He had selected their targets, he had worn his soles thin on the streets of Mumbai making his plans. He had located the beach from which they began their onslaught. He had spent over a year in Mumbai to make this possible.

  Kneeling, he had prayed for the last few months, the last few weeks, the last few days, that his efforts would bear fruit. He had prayed that mercy would take leave that day. He had prayed for blood, death, and destruction in India.

  Now it had happened, and there was no way back. Not for him.

  It was quiet in the big house in Lahore, but not for much longer.

  Headley turned on CNN.

  3

  THE ARMY OF THE RIGHTEOUS

  Pakistan

  February 2002

  The jet of water struck Headley’s right hand.

  He rinsed his hand, wrist, arm, and elbow three times before repeating the ritual with his left hand. Then he washed his mouth, face, head, ears, and feet.

  He knelt facing Mecca. And bent forward, until his forehead, nose, and hands all carefully touched the ground.

  “Allahu akbar. God is the greatest,” said Headley. “I acknowledge that there is no god but Allah.”