The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (25 page)

Thursday, 27 November 2008
,
12.40 a.m. – Marine Drive

The normal soundtrack to the city was the growling congestion that turned a thirteen-mile dash from Apollo Bunder to Andheri (and the airport) into a sclerotic, two-hour crawl. However, on this cool, dry, post-monsoon evening, the police and army had locked down all the main thoroughfares, resulting in the kind of profound silence that had not been heard for half a century.

Behind the Taj, in Back Bay, a lone silver Škoda sped up a
deserted Marine Drive in the halogen glow, passing the Trident–Oberoi, also under siege, and following the Queen’s Necklace, the boardwalk of lights, north. ‘Škoda car, Škoda car MH-02 JP1276, silver colour, hijacked by terrorists,’ an officer radioed, the alert reaching a roadblock opposite the Ideal Café, in Chowpatty, the last major junction before the road wound up into Malabar Hill. Police cocked their weapons as the car appeared, juddering to a halt in front of them. A sub-inspector stepped forward, facing the dazzling headlights, blowing his whistle. The driver turned on his wipers, spraying the windscreen to obscure the view.

‘Switch off the lights, raise your hands and step out.’ The car engine revved and the car lurched towards him. At the last minute it swung round, getting stuck on a road divider. Two officers ran to Ajmal’s side, while someone shot out the rear window. Ismail told Ajmal to raise his hands and then pulled out a pistol and fired at the advancing police. They returned fire and, to Ajmal’s horror, Ismail slumped, shot in the neck.

Ajmal cautiously opened his door. He appeared to stumble before hauling out an assault rifle from between his legs. A policeman grabbed the barrel, pulling and tugging. Ajmal got his finger to the trigger and let off a long burst into the officer’s stomach. The policeman lurched back but held on, even as he was dying, the skin of his hands fused to the burning AK.

A mob of khaki uniforms turned on blood-spattered Ajmal, kicking, stripping, slapping and beating him, bystanders joining in, too, until someone cried out: ‘Stop, stop, we need him alive.’ He was pushed into an ambulance, lying on the metal floor, his hands tied together with a handkerchief, Ismail’s corpse jiggling beside him. Ajmal’s brand-new tennis shoes were left behind in the road.

Calls about the shooting of three legendary police officers in Rang Bhavan Lane were piling up, but the only person to reach the scene was Karkare’s wireless operator, who radioed in the catastrophe at 00.47: ‘Karkare Sir, East Region Sir [Kamte] and PI Salaskar Sir are injured. We are taking them to the hospital.’

In the Control Room, the tragedy was instantly displaced by other news. Two gunmen had been shot in Chowpatty. ‘Where are the bodies?’ Maria demanded, calling Chowpatty’s Assistant Commissioner. ‘One is killed, but one is
alive
,’ the officer revealed. Maria was stunned. This was a huge result. Was the tide turning? He called for his staff car, readying to interrogate the prisoner. But before he got out of the door, Commissioner Gafoor rang, telling him to stay put. This was Chowpatty’s jurisdiction and its Additional Commissioner would be in charge. Maria was incandescent. The city was burning, and the Taj besieged. The force needed a scalpel to fillet information from the captured gunmen. The Additional Commissioner, who had inched his way up over twenty-five years, was, with all respect, more slow moving. But Gafoor, who was under intense pressure, was insistent and unyielding. This was Chowpatty’s show.

Maria bit his lip and quietly dispatched a trusted Crime Branch inspector to shadow the Additional Commissioner and make sure he did not screw it up. There were five questions he needed answering at this critical juncture: how many terrorists were there, who sent them, how had they entered the city, what was their aim and where was the location of their control? ‘Open the prisoner’s mouth and check for cyanide,’ he shouted after his man.

At 00.56, Gafoor came back on the line. Where were Kamte and Karkare? Maria choked. ‘. . . Sir, Ashok [Kamte] is near the SB office, sir. He is covering the SB office, sir.’ But Kamte was not there. He had been down the road, in Rang Bhavan Lane, the victim of a deadly shooting, an incident that had been called in by many eyewitnesses and police patrols from shortly after midnight.

What about the ATS chief, Hemant Karkare? ‘Sir . . . Sir, he . . . he . . . he . . . Hemant was . . . sir, at the CST railway station. I will find out the location and tell him to get in touch with you right away, sir.’ The Control Room log showed that the ATS chief had called in his decision to leave CST for Cama Hospital at 23.24, more than an hour and a half earlier.

The Commissioner pressed on, unsure of what he was being told: ‘I only want to know whether Mr Karkare and Kamte are
injured or are they safe?’ Maria, normally unflappable, replied: ‘Sir, trying to do that, sir. Sir, as for the report . . . that there was firing on East Region [Kamte] vehicle, nobody is injured. As soon as I get through I will get back to you.’ There was no mention of the bullet-riddled Qualis in which all three officers had been gunned down. ‘You will send a party . . . ?’ the Commissioner asked. ‘Already done, sir . . . Already done, sir. Additional CP Crime and there are three units of Crime Branch on the job, sir,’ Maria said, signing off.

Nine minutes earlier, Karkare’s radio operator had called Control to confirm that the fallen officers were in transit to GT Hospital, where all of them were declared dead.

1 a.m. – Nair Hospital

Sandwiched between Mumbai Central railway station and the city’s Mahalaxmi racetrack (named after the goddess of luck and prosperity), Nair Hospital lay four miles north of the Taj. Chowpatty’s Additional Commissioner Tanaji Ghadge was already waiting, chewing a wodge of paan, a police belt cinching his overfed belly, when Ajmal Kasab was stretchered in.

In a private room of the casualty ward, Ajmal was stripped, cleaned up and placed on a metal bed on top of a green plastic sheet, his torso left bare, a rough wool blanket thrown over his belly. He lay connected to a drip, his right arm and left hand bandaged, both hands blackened with gunpowder.

Ghadge got a camera rolling and focused on the quivering prisoner. Facing the ceiling, eyes closed, Ajmal wailed: ‘I have committed a big mistake.’ He was terrified. Ghadge leant over, chewing. ‘On whose order?’ With the simplicity of a country boy, Ajmal replied through parched lips: ‘On the orders of
chacha.
The one from Lashkar.’ Without being pressed, Ajmal had coughed the one thing no one was supposed to find out – the mastermind behind the attack.

But Ghadge had not noticed. He stumbled over the words ‘uncle’
and ‘lashkar’. ‘Lashkar what? Which village is he from?’ he asked, confusing the outfit’s name with a word meaning ‘village defence committee’. He bamboozled Ajmal, too. Soon they were talking at cross-purposes. ‘I don’t know about his village,’ Ajmal said, ‘but he has an office.’ He was referring to Zaki’s headquarters at the House of the Holy Warriors, above Muzaffarabad, another fact that sailed over Ghadge’s head.

‘Who persuaded you to go there?’ Ghadge asked, and the boy winced. ‘My father told me, “We are very poor. You will also earn money like the others.”’

‘Your real father?’ Already Ghadge was building his case that the entire family were co-conspirators.

‘Real father . . . real father,’ the boy replied quietly, seeming to drift back to the tongue-lashings and beatings that had driven him out of Faridkot. ‘He said we’ll earn money like the others.’

Out of shot, the room was packed with policemen, who whispered urgently. A dozen had descended on Nair Hospital after hearing the news. Meanwhile, Ghadge went back to the beginning. ‘OK, what’s your name?’

That was easy: ‘Ajmal.’

‘What’s your age?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘Where is your
gaon
[village]?’

‘Faridkot in
tehsil
[administrative district] Depalpur, district Okara.’ Some in the room began to make calls. Here was first proof that the assault had emanated from Pakistan, the fact that Lashkar had worked so hard to mask, using Internet telephony, cutting off all clothing labels, shaving the gunmen’s hair, dressing them in Western garb, with bracelets blessed in a Hindu temple tied around their wrists, Indian student ID cards in their trouser pockets.

But Ghadge became wrapped up in recording the suspect’s extended bio-data. Directions for Ajmal’s maternal uncle’s house – the policeman needed them. Questions about his elder brother’s wife – name and address? Why had she gone back home after the row with her husband over household expenses – and what was the
name of the bank that one passed on the way to their house? He was bogged down in the kitchen sink drama of Ajmal Kasab’s family. While, outside in the city, guests and staff were being culled in the ongoing slaughter at the burning Taj, Trident–Oberoi and Chabad House, Ghadge tripped over alien road names, village locations and Punjabi patronymics.

Repeat. Say again. Tell me once more. Even the prisoner grew frustrated, forced into drawing figurative sketches of distant relatives who were illiterate farmers and school kids that he not given a thought to for many years.

He tried to spit it out. ‘Look, my father told me we are very poor and then he introduced me to Lashkar men.’ He was twisting the story slightly, making his hated father the instigator, when it had been him and his friend, intoxicated by the carnival in Rawalpindi, who had got themselves dragooned into Lashkar. And whether it was the distance between this municipal bed and his cot in Faridkot, or the thought of his tyrannical father and the mother with a brittle laugh whom he would never see again, Ajmal began to cry.

Ghadge trundled on: ‘Is your father connected to Lashkar?’

‘No, no, no,’ Ajmal said, sniffing, righting the record. ‘They keep telling people it is jihad. It is a very honourable and daring job. You will earn lot of money and your poverty will be eliminated.’

Ghadge suddenly got on track. ‘When did your training start?’ Around him, the officers exhaled a collective sigh of relief. In the background, a TV was reporting the deaths of Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte – but all eyes were on the prisoner. ‘It was snowing that time,’ Ajmal said. ‘I was training in Battal village.’ Another crucial piece of intelligence slipped from his lips: the Mansehra training camp. Did he hope to save himself, or was it that he had only ever been trained to die?

‘Our boss used to tell us that you will go to heaven. I said, “I don’t like this . . . and I don’t want to stay here.”’ His eyes dilated. He had hoped someone would turn up at the outfit’s camp to take him away. Instead he had become part of a
fidayeen
outfit. ‘We were told, “Keep firing till death”,’ he said.

Ghadge twigged: ‘You are here for jihad?’

‘What jihad, sir?’ asked Ajmal, crying. The refrain that had been sung in the mountains of Muzaffarabad seemed meaningless in a hospital ward.

‘You have killed people like yourself.’

‘Yes, God will not forgive me,’ replied Ajmal, crestfallen. ‘They promised to give big amount of money to my family.’

‘Who will give?’

‘
Chacha
will give,’ Ajmal said.

‘Who is
Chacha?
’ Ajmal did not fight it. ‘His name is
chacha
Zaki. He has a long beard, he is around forty to forty-five years old.’ The boy stared at Ghadge. ‘He is a jihadi and fought during wars with Russia.’ Phones were picked up. The ATS or intelligence services would be able to work out who this
chacha
Zaki was. In a subcontinent without comprehensive DNA databases or identity cards, where complex family names had multiple spellings, and where radicals swapped their birth names for a nom de guerre, long lists were kept of known aliases.

Ajmal recited
chacha
’s words: ‘We are Muslims. This is not humanity. They have left you in poverty and are ahead of you.’ He looked up at the ceiling and recalled all the other backwater boys who had trained with him. ‘They taunt us about poverty. These places are full of poor people, who else will go there?’

‘Have they given you money?’

‘No. They may have given three lakh rupees [£2,300] to my father.’ A small price for a son.

Ghadge summed it up: ‘That means your father used you.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Ajmal replied, lips trembling, as a gloom enveloped him.

A pause.

‘What was Ismail’s role?’

Why hold out? Ajmal gave it all up. ‘Ismail was in charge.’ Elsewhere in the room, mobiles lit up again with the news that the police had killed the ringleader.

He volunteered two more names. Ali and Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’
(the elder), twenty-five, wearing a red shirt, and a red cap with the word ‘Yeshu’ written on it.

‘Yeshu?’ Ghadge asked. ‘You mean Christ?’

‘Yes’

‘But you are all Muslims?’

‘Yes, but you see, we had to look like
them
.’ He spelled it out for the officer.

Red shirt. The call went out. Rajvardhan, in the Taj CCTV room picked it up. Red shirt aka Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ was one of the Taj attackers.

The prisoner was flowing. ‘There is Umer, Akasha, Fahadullah, another Abdul Rehman, this one ‘Chhota’ [small]. Then there was Shoaib and Umar.’ One month earlier the team had relocated to a safe house in Karachi, where they were paired off into ‘buddies’ and shown films of their targets in Mumbai. Each pair of buddies had a mobile between them, pre-programmed with numbers to call. There were eight more of them in the city, besides Ajmal and Ismail.

The phone tap was now more important than ever.

There was no time to mourn the ATS chief, Karkare. His deputy, Parambir Singh, had to step up, signing off the ATS intercept request, by which time the intelligence agencies had passed to the technical section two more mobile phone numbers to monitor. Shortly after 1 a.m., +91 9910 719 424, the first of the three, rang, and Inspector Nivruti Kadam, the head of the ATS technical section, sitting in his office in Nagpada, listened in.

‘Hello.’ The caller was referred to as ‘Brother Wasi’. Kadam made a note. Wasi sounded like a nom de guerre. They would check it.