For the better part of a day he held the courtroom spellbound: he portrayed himself as a poor Pakistani who joined the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba only for money. But in the end, the mission was martyrdom, inflicting the greatest amount of death and chaos along the way. He told the court how he and his partner had assembled a bomb in a public bathroom at a train station, then planted another bomb in a taxi.
“I was firing, and Abu was hurling hand grenades,” he told the court, referring to his partner and to the assault on the train station, where more than 50 people were killed. “I fired at a policeman, after which there was no firing from the police side.”
His journey to Mumbai was at once banal and strange.
He told Judge M. L. Tahilyani that he was broke and tired of his job working for decorator in Jhelum, a small town in Pakistan, and making a pittance. He and a friend had hatched a plan. They would earn cash by robbing people. And to improve their banditry skills they would seek out military training from the easiest source available to a young Pakistani man: Islamic militants.
Mr. Kasab and his friend went to Rawalpindi, he said, and asked in the market where they might find mujahedeen. They were directed to the office of Lashkar-e-Taiba. Indian and American investigators say that Lashkar-e-Taiba planned the attacks in Pakistan. Although Pakistan initially denied that any of its citizens had been involved, it has now charged five men believed to be Pakistan-based Lashkar operatives with involvement. The organization’s founder, Hafez Saeed, has not been charged.
In the months before the attack, Mr. Kasab said in court, he and the other attackers were taken to a safe house in Karachi, the coastal city that is the commercial capital of Pakistan and is a world away from the Punjabi village where his family lived.
There the young men were cut off from the world. He said they and their trainers were not told where they would go next nor were they given any details about their mission, though it was clear that it would involve lethal weapons and deadly force.
“They told us we were to wait for some time,” Mr. Kasab said in court. “There was some problem.” They were warned sternly that “nobody will disobey” their orders.
In a month and a half, they were allowed out of the house only once for a training exercise when they were taught how to navigate the inflatable boats that they would use to leave Pakistani waters.
On Nov. 26, Mr. Kasab and nine other Pakistani men headed toward Mumbai in an inflatable dinghy, each of them armed with a Kalashnikov, a 9 millimeter, ammunition, hand grenades and a bomb containing explosives, steel ball bearings and a timer.
It is clear from the electronic record that the attackers seemed unworldly tools of their handlers.
In one video clip, the attackers wander through the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, seemingly dazed by the opulence of their surroundings. The 30-inch computer screens, huge windows, bathrooms and kitchens stunned the gunmen, most of them in their early 20s.
But they quickly snapped out of it, and the videos captured the muzzle flashes of the attackers’ Kalashnikovs as they opened fire in marbled hallways, kicking in hotel room doors and mowing down those hiding behind them.
A handler instructed a gunman, “For your mission to end successfully you must be killed.”
The Accidental Guerillia Syndrome
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Originally Posted by Farnan
