Security forces clear last Mumbai siege site

Authorities finished the gruesome task of removing bodies from the Taj Mahal hotel today, the final site of the Mumbai siege to be cleared.

They said the death toll from the attack stood at 172, including a British businessman.

Security forces scouring the 565-room hotel for booby traps and bodies and declared the landmark building cleared two days after they killed the last three militants holed up inside following a deadly, three-day rampage in India’s financial centre.

The army had already cleared two other sites, the five-star Oberoi hotel and the headquarters of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish centre.

The only gunman captured after the 60-hour terrorist siege of Mumbai said he belonged to a Pakistani militant group with links to the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, a senior police officer said.

The gunman was one of 10 who paralysed the city in an attack that wounded 239 and revealed the weakness of India’s security apparatus.

India’s top law enforcement official resigned yesterday, bowing to growing criticism that the attackers appeared better trained, better co-ordinated and better armed than police.

The announcement blaming militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, threatened to escalate tensions between India and Pakistan. However, Indian officials have been cautious about accusing Pakistan’s government of complicity.

Lashkar, long seen as a creation of the Pakistani intelligence service to help fight India in disputed Kashmir, was banned in Pakistan in 2002 under pressure from the US, a year after Washington and Britain listed it a terrorist group. It is since believed to have emerged under another name, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, though that group has denied links to the Mumbai attack.

As more details of the response to the attack emerged, a picture formed of woefully unprepared security forces.

“These guys could do it next week again in Mumbai and our responses would be exactly the same,” said Ajai Sahni, head of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management who has close ties to India’s police and intelligence.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh promised to strengthen maritime and air security and look into creating a new federal investigative agency.

Joint Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria said the only known surviving gunman, Ajmal Qasab, told police he was trained at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistan.

But a spokesman for Pakistani president Asif Zardari said: “We have demanded evidence of the complicity of any Pakistani group. No evidence has yet been provided.”

In the first wave of the attacks, two young gunmen armed with assault rifles ignored more than 60 police officers patrolling the city’s main railway station and sprayed bullets into the crowd.

Bapu Thombre, assistant commissioner with the Mumbai railway police, said police were armed mainly with batons or First World War-era rifles and spread out across the station.

The gunmen continued their rampage outside the station. They eventually ambushed a police van, killed five officers inside – including the city’s anti-terrorism chief – and hijacked the vehicle as two wounded officers lay bleeding in the back seat.

Constable Arun Jadhav, one of the wounded policemen, said the men laughed when they noticed the dead officers wore bulletproof vests.

With no SWAT team in the city of 18 million, formerly known as Bombay, authorities called in the only unit in the country trained to deal with such crises. But the National Security Guards, which largely devotes its resources to protecting top officials, is based outside of New Delhi and it took the commandos nearly 10 hours to reach the scene.

That gave the gunmen time to consolidate control over two luxury hotels and the Jewish centre, said Mr Sahni.

As the siege dragged on, local police improperly strapped on ill-fitting bulletproof vests. Few had two-way radios.

Even the commandos lacked night vision goggles and thermal sensors that would have allowed them to locate the hostages and gunmen inside the buildings, Mr Sahni said.

Security forces announced they had killed four gunmen and ended the siege at the mammoth Taj Mahal hotel on Thursday night, only to have fighting erupt there again the next day. Only on Saturday did they actually kill the last remaining gunmen.

At the Jewish centre, commandos dropped from a helicopter on to the roof and slowly descended the narrow, five-storey building in a 10-hour shooting and grenade battle with the two gunmen inside.

Assaf Hefetz, a former Israeli police commissioner who created the country’s police anti-terror unit three decades ago, said the commandos should have swarmed the building in a massive, co-ordinated attack that would have overwhelmed the gunmen and ended the stand-off in seconds.

But JK Dutt, director-general of the commando unit, defended their tactics.

“We have conducted the operation in the way we are trained and in the way we like to do it,” he said.

Mr Singh promised to expand the commando force and set up new bases around the country. He called a rare meeting of leaders from the country’s main political parties, hours after the resignation of home minister Shivraj Patil.