The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (20 page)

Headley found out by text message. He felt humiliated and exposed. He changed his email address ([email protected]) and hired a lawyer to make his separation with Faiza final. When she received the letter, Faiza called at Headley’s home. ‘A week ago you were in love with me and missing me,’ she shouted at him. ‘What happened?’ Headley ordered his bodyguard to get her off the premises. As they argued at the gate, she was punched and kicked, before running off tearfully to the women’s section of Race Course police station, around the back of the five-star Pearl Continental hotel, pressing assault charges.

Within hours, David Headley was under arrest. He was held in custody and questioned about attempting to kill his wife. Finally, after eight days a senior officer arrived and opened the cell door,
ushering Headley out on the orders of ‘someone higher up’, possibly in the Prime Minister’s office. As he put Headley into a taxi, he stooped down and whispered: ‘Stay out of the limelight for
all
of our sakes.’ Headley went home to Shazia, only to be called to Qadisiya mosque, where
amir
Hafiz Saeed was waiting. ‘Shut her up or get rid of her,’ he said, referring to Faiza. ‘Then, go home and pray for forgiveness.’

Muzaffarabad

High above the House of the Holy Warriors training complex, a circle of tents was pitched in the thin air of the upper camp. Ajmal Kasab and his comrades lay inside, lean after seven months of praying, running and shooting. Their blood ran faster in their veins and they talked among themselves of their ‘falcon spirit’ being ready to pounce on its prey. They knew their trainers, Qahafa the Bull and Al-Qama, better than their fathers and now they were told by them to go home to make their goodbyes to their families. Ajmal was handed 1,300 rupees (£10) for the journey, with instructions to impress on his mother how
izzat
(honour) would be bestowed for giving her son to a higher cause. In Faridkot, she was delighted to see him, cooking biryani like he was a bridegroom and she was giving him away. When news spread of his arrival, neighbours came to pay their respects, too, noting that Ajmal seemed withdrawn. He wanted to stay at home, he said, and welled up when he left for the bus stop. He arrived back at the House of the Holy Warriors seven days later to discover their group had shrunk once more.

Those left in the dwindling band were told to rename themselves with
kunyah
, or battle aliases, a sign that they had been born again into a new family of the pure. Ajmal could not think of anything original. In the end he chose the most obvious, Abu Mujahid, while Hafiz Arshad became Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ (the elder) and Shoaib became Abu Soheb. Naseer Ahmed, the skinny runt, became Abu Umer. They all signed pre-written wills that declared how their breasts
shone with purity and how they desired to quench their anger on the battlefield, before celebrating with a film show, sitting in a circle around Al-Qama, watching
fidayeen
attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir. When someone asked if they would be heading over the Line of Control, too, Al-Qama was elliptical in his response.

He was a veteran at preparing
fidayeen
for martyrdom, a task that he often bragged required him to infantilize the would-be commandos, instilling in them a child-like reverence, so that when they had to contemplate their own deaths or the killing of others, they would submit to orders that a freethinking adult would baulk at. He was particularly good on psychology and had spent much time analysing the make-up of each recruit so that when the time came he would match the strongest with the weakest.

By the next morning, the group had got smaller still. Al-Qama revealed that one team had already been assigned, and was en route to Indian-administered Kashmir. Out of an original pool of thirty-two trainees, there were only fifteen left, and in August they returned to the warm campus of Muridke, outside Lahore. In the stagnating Lashkar swimming pool, down the far end of the camp, they practised treading water for hours and recovered objects thrown into the viscous water.

The group shrank again when two recruits ran away. Not everyone wanted to become a martyr. Al-Qama told
chacha
he needed a date for Operation Bombay. The longer it took to launch, the more time there was for the boys to brood.

Ajmal conceded to the others that he was terrified, and wished he had stayed home with his mother. Abdul Rehman ‘Chhota’ (little) was suffering more than any of them. Once known as Mohammed Altaf, he came from the brick kilns of a village so impoverished it had only a number, 511, located thirty miles from Vehari, the Punjab’s City of Cotton. Breaking the rules, Chhota called home a dozen times, and was overheard asking a family member to pay Lashkar to free him.

The outfit could not lose another recruit and Abu Shoaib was ordered to mentor the desperate Chhota. Although he was the youngest at only eighteen, Shoaib, with his unruly black curls, dense
eyebrows and stubby jaw, had emerged as a resilient fighter. After a martyrdom lecture, Al-Qama had asked if anyone was scared. Shoaib had raised his hand. ‘What is there to be scared of when the only thing to look forward to in this life is death,’ he told the class.

Al-Qama gathered them all together, waited for quiet and asked them to close their eyes ‘There is nothing more a brother can give than his life for jihad,’ he told them. ‘And his reward will be infinite.’

September 2008 – Karachi

Early in the month, an apprehensive Ajmal Kasab and twelve others were put on a train for Karachi, with no idea where they were to be deployed. The group included Ajmal’s sidekicks Umer, Abdul Rehman and Shoaib, and were lodged in a place codenamed ‘Azizabad’. That was the name of an upmarket district in central Karachi, and Lashkar used it to misdirect snoopers, as their ‘Azizabad’ was actually in a secret compound in Yousaf Goth, a district in the far north of Karachi, Pakistan’s volatile seaside megalopolis. If there is safety in numbers, then here in the City of Lights, among the 21 million legal residents, anything could be hidden.

Azizabad looked like any other family house. But behind its curly iron gates and permanently closed curtains were dorms and a classroom stocked with navigational training manuals, procured by the ISI’s double agent, ‘Honey Bee’. A map of the Indian coastline was pinned to the wall. For relaxation, there was a small library of jihadi magazines and pamphlets, including the Lashkar primer,
Why are We Waging Jihad?
But after the kinetic camps the boys found it hard to sit around. Since the holy month of Ramadan had also begun, the team were fasting, which only served to increase everyone’s fractiousness. When they were not attending training sessions, they mostly slept, idling away the hours until sundown – when they could eat.

An instructor from Muridke, Abu Hamza, joined them. Although only a lowly soldier in the outfit, he was the perfect fit for Operation Bombay. His real name was Syed Zabiuddin Ansari, and he was a
28-year-old Indian by birth, raised in the rural hinterlands of central Maharashtra. He knew Mumbai well. Fluent in Marathi, Hindi and Urdu, he had travelled to Pakistan in his teens, settling in the southern Punjab. Radicalized by watching TV footage of the devastating anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, he had joined Lashkar. They placed him back in India in 2006 to amass a weapons stockpile and assist in a series of bomb blasts. His tradecraft had been poor, his cover blown in under a year, with many fellow
mujahideen
slain and jailed, leaving Lashkar with no alternative other than to ex-filtrate him back to Pakistan, via Bangladesh, in a costly operation that had left the outfit’s
sura
keen to expel him.

But now, using the name Hamza, he had been given a second chance with a job that even this accident-prone Indian
mujahid
could not foul up. Hamza began to teach Ajmal and the team serviceable Marathi and Hindi so they could talk to a taxi driver and ask for directions. India was a fearful and foreign concept to the boys, so while he was at it Hamza also explained the Hindu caste system, how they ate and prayed. He coached them in its culture, while outside the gates of Azizabad a Lashkar procurement operation was stepped up.

Since April 2008, Lashkar had amassed an Operation Bombay war chest of 2,168,000 rupees (£14,000). The outfit was so used to being sheltered by the ISI that its moneyman did not even bother to use an alias, keeping the funds in his own account at the Allied Bank in Drigh Colony, Karachi.

The moneyman rented safe houses for Lashkar instructors, ten of whom would assist the running of Operation Bombay, and he gave 180,000 rupees (£1,175) to a Lashkar lieutenant and registered boat operator to buy an outboard engine from ARZ Water Sports in Karachi. He purchased sixteen life jackets, an air pump, inflatable dinghies and a boat, the
Al-Hussaini
, a legal carrier, with a Port Clearance Certificate (PCC) BFD-5846 issued by Pakistan Customs. As backup, he bought a second smaller boat, the
Al-Fouz
, paying 80,000 rupees (£522) in cash, and leased a third, the
Al-Atta.
Next he recruited fourteen sailors, signing up a Lashkar sympathizer as
tindal
(coxswain), who was given the codename Hakim-saab. They
could rely on Hakim as he had helped them in smuggling operations the previous year.

The boat operator’s father, known as ‘the ‘Hajji’, was also put to work scouting for a launch spot, settling on a forty-eight-acre site with five thatched huts and a three-bedroomed brick house in Goth Ali Nawaz Shah, a village beyond the south-eastern fringes of the sprawling city. Less than a mile from a creek that flowed out to the Arabian Sea, it was the perfect spot to learn the basics of sailing and clambering in and out of boats. Here the recruits could prepare for the unpredictable open waters without drowning or being overlooked. The coast guard was reporting unseasonal swells, with massive waves pounding the shores. The newspapers were full of death notices.

Two days after arriving in Karachi, Ajmal and the others visited. Glad to be outside, they happily practised deflating and inflating dinghies, capsizing and righting the boats, stripping down, drying and oiling their weapons after they had been dunked. They unpacked large zinc chests, padded out with pink foam. Inside were detonators, sticky tins of powdered RDX explosive, grenades and cartridges. The first bomb assembly classes began immediately, and afterwards they ventured out into open waters for the first time. For landlocked boys who had lived their lives in the arid scrub, it must have been terrifying.

One hour out from the shore, they glimpsed the
Al-Hussaini.
Hakim-saab, the coxswain, welcomed them on board and familiarized them with marine charts, explaining the basics of navigation. Over the next two days, they learned how to use the boat’s GPS system and perfected their cover as a fishing expedition, flinging nets and hauling them in, roasting the fish they caught on a brazier at night, all of them desperate to know when they were sailing and where to.

After three days, Al-Qama turned up. Phase one was over. He announced that he was taking the team back to the dry and cool of the mountains. It took twenty-four hours to reach the House of the Holy Warriors, where
amir
Hafiz Saeed and
chacha
Zaki greeted them with unsettling news. The group that had been living and
training together for many months was to be divided. Six of them had been assigned a mission in Kashmir that had just jumped the queue. They all waited anxiously for their names to be called. Ajmal Kasab was not on the list. What had they in mind for him? Lashkar was like a conveyor belt that never gave self-doubt time to seed.

After their colleagues had departed,
chacha
introduced three new men. ‘They are
fidayeen
like you,’ he explained, understanding how difficult it would be to integrate the new faces. Ajmal discovered that two of the new boys, Fahadullah and Javed, were from villages in his home district of Okara. As they ate, Fahadullah, twenty-four, revealed he was the nephew of Qahafa the Bull. He had two fingers missing from his left hand, which the boys assumed was a battle wound and seemed, in these jittery days, strangely reassuring. In fact it was a birth defect, but the boy had been told by his uncle not to tell anyone, lest they think him unlucky.

Javed was from Gugera, a village north of Okara, the youngest of seven, and had spent his childhood in a
madrassa.
At sixteen he told his parents he intended to join Lashkar. His father, a grain trader, had been furious and tried to marry him off to a fourteen-year-old neighbour. Javed had run away, taking shelter in Lashkar’s district HQ at Okara. From there he was smuggled to the Muridke campus, where he disappeared into the training regime, shed his real family and joined another, taking the battle name Abu Ali.

The third new arrival, Ismail Khan, from a North West Frontier Province town of the same name, was the only non-Punjabi in the group. He kept to himself until the thirteenth day of the
Roza
(as the Ramadan fast days are known) – 13 September – when
amir
Hafiz Saeed returned, alongside the Major General.

‘The time for jihad has now come,’ the
amir
solemnly announced, taking his familiar stance, hands against chest. Ajmal recalled the silence that followed, as if everyone had inhaled. ‘You are to attack mainland India.’ Ajmal, who had always presumed he was heading for Indian-administered Kashmir, was stunned. Before he could process the information,
chacha
Zaki stepped forward to speak. ‘The financial clout of India is created in the powerhouse of Bombay. You are to
attack using a sea route.’ Ajmal looked around and could see that the others were just as shocked. Lashkar operations rarely strayed into major Indian cities. Behind him, the Major General grinned broadly. He whispered into Zaki’s ear before Lashkar’s commander continued: ‘Are you all ready?’ The room stayed silent. Zaki tried again: ‘The Major General Sahib wants to see how well-prepared you are.’