Jyoti Krishan Dutt, former chief of the elite National Security Guards (NSG) that led the fightback against the 26/11 attackers in Mumbai, has hinted that the terrorists may have had local help as they were extremely familiar with the area of operations.
Suspicions about local support have been raised off and on by some politicians, including Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, but the local police force in Maharashtra has always denied this. Without actually contradicting them, Dutt said the terrorists knew their locales inside out. This was borne out by recent disclosures on David Coleman Headley’s links to 26/11.
Speaking exclusively to
DNA, Dutt said, “What is coming out now is a matter of investigation and verification…But at the time this incident was going on in Mumbai, we were all convinced of one thing: that these terrorists were heavily armed, they were well trained, they knew how to handle all this equipment. And they were very, very familiar to the area.”
“The familiarity came through stay in the area or through recce and visit to the area or by looking at video clips. It is a matter of investigation. But they were very, very familiar.” This familiarity couldn’t have come without a detailed recce or training based on information, Dutt admitted.
It is in this context that he finds the 26/11 links of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative Headley and his Canadian associate Tahawwur Hussain Rana believable. The duo, who are currently in FBI custody in the US, are reported to have laid the groundwork for the 26/11 terror attacks, according to information emerging from the investigative agencies.
“It fits into the picture of the incident as it occurred,” Dutt said. “If some of the revelations that have appeared in the newspapers are correct and accurate, then they (Headley and Rana) would be linked to the (terror) module.”
It was only at the Oberoi (the Trident) that they didn’t seem too familiar with the terrain, and they were resting in a room. In the other places, the terrorists chose rooms with multiple-entry-exit points, so that they could move about freely. This information even the NSG did not have.
During the operations, the commandos found that if they “covered one door, they (the terrorists) would always try to get out from other doors. All these details were not known to the NSG, that this particular room had another door to move out of or go up and down”. But such nuanced information was available with the terrorists, Dutt said.
“As we found later, Wasabi restaurant and Habour Bar (at the Taj) were interconnected with a spiral staircase,” Dutt said. In fact, it was at the inter-link between the two restaurants that the last of the terrorists was killed in the Taj.
