India Names Mumbai Mastermind
MUMBAI — India has named a senior leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba as the mastermind of last week’s terror attacks that killed at least 172 people here, and demanded the Pakistani government turn him over and take action against the group.
Just two days before hitting the city, the group of 10 terrorists who ravaged India’s financial capital communicated with Yusuf Muzammil and four other Lashkar leaders via a satellite phone that they left behind on a fishing trawler they hijacked to get to Mumbai, a senior Mumbai police official told The Wall Street Journal. The entire group also underwent rigorous training in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, the official said.
And Mr. Muzammil had earlier been in touch with an Indian Muslim extremist who scoped out Mumbai locations for possible attack before he was arrested early this year, said another senior Indian police official. The Indian man, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, had in his possession layouts drawn up for the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower and Mumbai’s main railway station, both prime targets of last week’s attack, the police official said.
Mr. Ansari, who also made sketches and maps of other locations in southern Mumbai that weren’t attacked, had met Mr. Muzammil and trained at the same Lashkar camp as the terrorists in last week’s attack, an official said.
American intelligence officials agreed Mr. Muzammil was a focus of their attention in the attacks, though they stopped short of calling him the mastermind. “That is a name that is definitely on the radar screen,” a U.S. counterterrorism official said.
Information gathered in the probe also continues to point to a connection to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a U.S. counterterrorism official said. Along with a confession from the one gunmen captured in the attacks, U.S. officials cited phone calls intercepted by satellite during the attacks that connected the assailants to members of Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, as well as the recovered satellite phone from the boat, U.S. officials said.