Absence of Weapons with Mumbai Police Caused More Deaths during 26/11: FBI
The FBI has described the Mumbai terror attacks as ‘deceptively simple and highly coordinated with little money expended’ and said that the crippling flaw in the defence of Mumbai police against the initial assault was that its officers didn’t even carry weapons, said media reports.
Besides, the American agency pointed that the Indian forces were not equipped with the sophisticated gadgets and systems to intercept the communication between the attackers and their handlers in Pakistan, reports said.
According to FBI, absence of weapons with police personnel resulted in dozens of people being killed at five-star hotels, a train station and a Jewish centre before the specialised Indian forces killed all but one of the terrorists, said reports.
“Half of these guys weren’t armed during the initial assault in Mumbai,” Sergent Alan Matas was quoted as saying. “That’s half the battle.”
“If something like this happened here, we would respond with a more organised attack,” Detective Ivan Cabrera was quoted as saying by The Miami Herald newspaper.
FBI’s Supervisory Special Agent Anthony Tindall told members of the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and others gathered at the Sunrise Civic Centre over the weekend that ‘in the US, we would bring guns and bullets much quicker than the Indians could have’, reports said.
Tindall, now based in Hawaii as the FBI’s liaison to the US Pacific Command, said that India sought the FBI’s help during the November 26-28 attack and the bureau deployed eight agents from Los Angeles as well as technicians from Quantico, Virginia, said reports.
He said that FBI gained the trust of Indian investigators almost immediately because its agents and technicians were able to glean significant information from GPS, cellphones, satellite phones, Internet data, financial records, witnesses and boats used by the terrorists, reports said.
“One of the things we learned from this operation is that we needed to bring them something they couldn’t do themselves,” Tindall told the audience, while showing TV news accounts of the massacre.
“A lot of the information led back to Pakistan,” he was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
Another major turning point in the investigation was the early arrest of Pakistani national Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, the lone survivor.
He was a poor, uneducated young man recruited, trained and selected for the mission directed by Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Tindall called Ajmal, who joined another terrorist in the deadly Mumbai railway station attack, ‘an incredible source of information’.
(Based on internet reports)
