"Terrorism can never be justified as an act of faith. It is an act of evil in all circumstances."  
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 1 July 2007

Obama Says S.Asia Is Chief Threat to U.S.
By REUTERS
Filed at 12:40 p.m. ET
December 1, 2008

CHICAGO (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama said on Monday militants based in South Asia represented the biggest threat to the United States and he was "absolutely committed" to eliminating the threat of terrorism.

"We cannot tolerate a world where innocents are killed by extremists based on twisted ideologies," Obama, who takes office on January 20, told reporters after naming his national security team.

"We're going to have to bring the full force of our power -- not only military but also diplomatic, economic and political -- to deal with those threats. Not only to keep America safe but also to ensure that peace and prosperity continue around the world."

With the world shocked by the deadly Islamic militant attack on India's financial center of Mumbai that killed 183 people, Obama pointed to South Asia as the area of greatest concern.

"The situation in Afghanistan has been worsening. The situation in South Asia as a whole and the safe havens for terrorists that have been established there, represent the single most important threat against the American people," he said.

"We're going to have to mobilize our resources and focus our attention on defeating al Qaeda, (Osama) bin Laden, and any other extremists groups that intend to target American citizens."

Obama offered American support when he spoke to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after the Mumbai attacks.  India has blamed the attacks on militants from Pakistan. Obama said that while sovereign nations "obviously have the right to defend themselves", he did not want to comment on the specifics surrounding the Mumbai attack.

"I am confident that India's great democracy is more resilient than killers who would tear it down," Obama said.

"I can tell you that my administration will remain steadfast in support of India's efforts to catch the perpetrators of this terrible act and bring them to justice. And I expect that the world community will feel the same way."
"Footprint" of any other terror plots?
How about the latest coordinated attacks -
Mumbai 9/11 -against the police? 
Link to NYTIMES map. 
What about the old "assassination covered up by something else" trick?



New deployment techniques for pirate speed boats aiming bigger?
How is this form of "terror" related to any of the others?  DIE HARD 3, the movie, come to life?  Where is Bruce Willis when you need him?

Germans Save Egyptian Ship From Somali Pirates
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:20 a.m. ET
December 25, 2008

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- A German military helicopter chased away pirates on Thursday who were trying to board an Egyptian ship off the coast of Somalia. One of the ship's crew was shot in the attack.

The bulk carrier with 31 crew was passing through the Gulf of Aden on its way to Asia when gun-toting pirates in a speedboat began pursuing it, said Noel Choong of the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center.  A passing ship alerted the Kuala Lumpur-based bureau, which asked a multinational naval coalition force in the area to help, said Choong.

In response, the German navy frigate Karlsruhe dispatched a helicopter, a military spokesman said on condition of anonymity, citing policy.  The pirates fled as the chopper reached the vessel, according to a statement from the German military, but not before shooting and injuring one the ship's crew.  A second helicopter, carrying a medical team, retrieved the injured crew, who is now receiving treatment on the Karlsruhe, the statement said.

Piracy has taken an increasing toll on international shipping this year, especially in the Gulf of Aden -- one of the world's busiest sea lanes. Spurred by widespread poverty in their homeland, Somali pirates have made an estimated $30 million hijacking ships for ransom this year.  More than a dozen warships are now patrolling the vast gulf. Countries as diverse as Britain, India, Iran, America, France and Germany have naval forces in the waters or on their way there.

''Despite increased naval patrols, pirates are continuing to attack ships because the warships cannot be everywhere at the same time. But we are pleased with the quick assistance by the coalition force,'' Choong said.

Choong said there have been 110 pirate attacks this year in the Gulf of Aden, including 42 hijackings. Most were released after a ransom was paid, though 14 -- with more than 240 crew -- are still being held.  A second German frigate responded to another emergency call Thursday from a different ship in the gulf, the military said. The statement gave no other details on that incident.

Japan said Wednesday it is considering sending military ships to join the coalition. China is scheduled to send warships on Friday.  Somalia, a nation of about 8 million people, has not had a functioning government since warlords overthrew a dictator in 1991 and then turned on each other.

3 Chinese Ships to Leave Friday for Somalia
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:40 a.m. ET
December 23, 2008

BEIJING (AP) -- Chinese warships on a mission to protect their country's vessels and crews from pirate attacks off Somalia will depart Friday, armed with special forces, helicopters and plans to share information with other countries working in the area.

The operation, China's first major naval mission abroad, will include destroyers Haikou and Wuhan as well as a large supply ship, said Rear Adm. Xiao Xinnian, Deputy Chief of Staff of the People's Liberation Army Navy. On board will be two helicopters and traditional weapons such as missiles and cannons...

Though the purpose of the mission was to protect Chinese ships and crews, Beijing has called for stepped up cooperation in anti-piracy efforts. China announced it was sending warships to the area after the U.N. Security Council authorized nations to conduct land and air attacks on pirate bases...

A Communist Party newspaper has said the mission would initially last three months, but Huang did not give an exact length, saying the duration would depend on the U.N. mandate and conditions in the area. The ships will depart Friday from the island province of Hainan in southern China.

A German Navy frigate, meanwhile, sailed out of Djibouti's harbor Tuesday to protect civilian ships in the region from Somali-based pirates.  The Karlsruhe, with some 240 sailors on board as well as speedboats and a helicopter, set off after lawmakers in Berlin last week approved Germany's participation in a one-year, European Union-led anti-piracy mission...full story here.

Indian Navy Captures 23 Pirates in Gulf of Aden
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:49 p.m. ET
December 13, 2008

NEW DELHI (AP) -- The Indian navy captured 23 pirates who threatened a merchant vessel Saturday in the lawless waters of the Gulf of Aden, where dozens of ships have come under attack by gunmen in recent months.

An Indian navy ship, the INS Mysore, was escorting merchant ships in gulf off Somalia when it received a distress call from seamen on board the MV Gibe, who said they were being attacked by two boats.  The message said the pirates were firing as their boats closed in on the Gibe, according to a statement from the Indian government. The pirate boats attempted to escape when they saw the Mysore and its helicopter, but were boarded by Indian marine commandoes, the statement said.

The pirates had ''a substantial cache of arms and equipment,'' including seven AK-47 assault rifles, three machine guns, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and other weapons, the statement said. They also found a GPS receiver and other equipment.  The pirates were from Somalia and Yemen, two countries on the coast of the Gulf of Aden.

The Gibe was flying an Ethiopian flag, the statement said, but there was no further information about the ship.

Last month, India's navy drew criticism after sinking a Thai fishing trawler that had been commandeered hours earlier by pirates. At least one Thai crew member was killed in the attack, which the Indian navy had originally announced by saying it had sunk a pirate ''mother ship.'' The Indian navy defended its actions, saying it had fired in self-defense.

Somali pirates have become increasingly brazen, and recently seized a Saudi supertanker loaded with $100 million of crude oil. Many of the vessels are taken to pirate-controlled regions in Somalia, where they are held for ransom.  It was not immediately clear what would happen to the pirates captured by the Indians, or where they would be taken. The statement said only that the prisoners and their weapons would be ''handed over to appropriate authorities ashore.''

Most foreign navies patrolling the Somali coast have been reluctant to detain suspects because of uncertainties over where they would face trial, since Somalia has no effective central government or legal system.

An estimated 1,500 pirates are based in Somalia's semiautonomous Puntland region, raking in millions of dollars.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will present a draft Security Council resolution next week asking the United Nations to authorize ''all necessary measures'' against piracy from Somalia.  But on Friday, the commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet expressed doubt about the wisdom of launching attacks against Somali pirates on land, as the draft proposes.

U.S. Vice Adm. Bill Gortney told reporters that it is difficult to identify pirates, and the potential for killing innocent civilians ''cannot be overestimated.''
Somali Pirates Threat Force Cruise Ship Evacuation
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:18 a.m. ET
December 9, 2008

BERLIN (AP) -- A cruise ship will evacuate passengers before sailing through waters off the Somali coast and fly them to the next port of call to protect them from possible pirate attacks, German cruise operator Hapag-Lloyd said Tuesday.  An official with the European Union's anti-piracy mission said separately that the force would station armed guards on vulnerable cargo ships in the Gulf of Aden.

The MS Columbus cruise ship will drop off its 246 passengers before the ship and some of its crew sail through the Gulf on Wednesday, the Hamburg-based company said in a statement, without saying exactly where they would disembark. It said the passengers would take a charter flight Wednesday to Dubai and spend three days at a five-star hotel waiting to rejoin the 150-meter (490-foot) vessel in the southern Oman port of Salalah for the remainder of a round-the-world tour that began in Italy.

The company said it was sending its passengers on the detour as a ''precautionary measure,'' given rampant piracy off the coast of lawless Somalia that recently has targeted cruise ships as well as commercial vessels, including a Saudi oil tanker and a Ukrainian ship carrying tanks and other weapons.

Last week, pirates fired upon the M/S Nautica, a cruise liner carrying 650 passengers and 400 crew members, but the massive ship quickly outran its assailants. Other ships have not been so lucky. Pirates have attacked 32 vessels and hijacked 12 of them since NATO deployed a four-vessel flotilla on Oct. 24 to escort cargo ships and conduct anti-piracy patrols.  An EU anti-piracy mission -- which takes over for the NATO ships on Monday -- may also involve stationing armed guards on the most vulnerable cargo ships in high-risk areas, the British naval commander in charge of the EU mission said Tuesday.

British Vice-Admiral Philip Jones said the guards could be placed on some ships transporting food aid to Somalia. The EU mission will also includes four ships and two maritime reconnaissance aircraft.  In addition to the EU vessels, about a dozen other warships from the U.S. 5th Fleet based in Bahrain, as well as from India, Russia and Malaysia and other nations are patrolling in the area.

The Russian navy will soon replace its warship in the region with another from a different fleet, navy spokesman Capt. Igor Dygalo said Tuesday in Moscow.  The missile frigate Neustrashimy, or Intrepid -- deployed from Russia's Northern Fleet after pirates seized the Ukrainian ship carrying tanks in September -- has escorted freighters through the Gulf and helped thwart at least two pirate attacks, the navy said.

The Intrepid will remain in the region through December and be replaced by a ship from Russia's Pacific Fleet.
Piracy Is Terrorism
NYTIMES
By DOUGLAS R. BURGESS Jr.
December 5, 2008

THE golden age of piracy has returned. Just as Henry Every and William Kidd once made their fortunes in the Red Sea, a new generation has emerged, armed with grenade launchers and assault rifles, to threaten trade and distract the world’s navies. With the recent capture of the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star, a crime that once seemed remote and archaic has again claimed center stage.

And yet the world’s legal apparatus is woefully confused as to how to respond to piracy. Are the Somali pirates ordinary criminals, or a quasi-military force?

The question is not insignificant. It has virtually paralyzed the navies called to police the Gulf of Aden. The German Navy frigate Emden, on patrol this spring to intercept Qaeda vessels off the Somali coast, encountered pirate vessels attacking a Japanese tanker. But since it was allowed to intervene only if the pirates were defined as “terrorists,” the Emden had no choice but to let the pirates go. Currently, 13 vessels are held by pirates in the Gulf of Aden, while the navies of a dozen nations circle almost helplessly.

The legal confusion extends to what happens once pirates have been caught. In theory, any nation can shoulder the burden of prosecution. In fact, few are eager to do so.

Prosecuting pirates puts enormous strain on a country’s legal system. A state whose ship was not attacked, and whose only involvement with the incident was as rescuer, might balk at being asked to foot the bill for lengthy and costly proceedings. Yet it might find itself forced to do so, if neither the victim’s nor the pirates’ state is willing. As Somalia has not had a recognized government since the early 1990s, the situation is all the more precarious for would-be capturers. The result is that ship owners, knowing that no rescue is imminent, pay the ransom. This emboldens the pirates further, and the problem worsens.

Fortunately, there is a way out of this legal morass. Indeed, the law is very clear — we just seem to have forgotten about it.

The solution to piracy lies in the very nature of piracy itself. The Roman lawmaker Cicero defined piracy as a crime against civilization itself, which English jurist Edward Coke famously rephrased as “hostis humani generis” — enemies of the human race. As such, they were enemies not of one state but of all states, and correspondingly all states shared in the burden of capturing them.

From this precept came the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, meaning that pirates — unlike any other criminals — could be captured wherever they were found, by anyone who found them. This recognition of piracy’s unique threat was the cornerstone of international law for more than 2,000 years.

Though you wouldn’t guess it from the current situation, the law is surprisingly clear. The definition of pirates as enemies of the human race is reaffirmed in British and American trial law and in numerous treaties.

As a customary international law (albeit one that has fallen out of use since the decline of traditional piracy) it cuts through the Gordian knot of individual states’ engagement rules. Pirates are not ordinary criminals. They are not enemy combatants. They are a hybrid, recognized as such for thousands of years, and can be seized at will by anyone, at any time, anywhere they are found.

And what of the Emden’s problem? Are pirates a species of terrorist? In short, yes. The same definition of pirates as hostis humani generis could also be applied to international organized terrorism. Both crimes involve bands of brigands that divorce themselves from their nation-states and form extraterritorial enclaves; both aim at civilians; both involve acts of homicide and destruction, as the United Nations Convention on the High Seas stipulates, “for private ends.”

For this reason, it seems sensible that the United States and the international community adopt a new, shared legal definition that would recognize the link between piracy and terrorism. This could take the form of an act of Congress or, more broadly, a new jurisdiction for piracy and terrorism cases at the International Criminal Court.

There is ample precedent. In the 1970s, the hijacking of airliners was defined by the United Nations as “aerial piracy.” In 1985, when Palestinian terrorists seized the cruise ship Achille Lauro and held its passengers hostage, President Ronald Reagan called the hijackers “pirates.” Recent evidence also indicates that the Somali pirates hand over a part of their millions in ransom money to Al Shabaab, the Somali rebel group that has been linked to Al Qaeda.

The similarities and overlaps between the two crimes have prompted some jurists to advocate abandoning the term piracy altogether in favor of “maritime terrorism.” By reasserting the traditional definition of pirates as hostis humani generis, and linking it to terrorism, the United States and other nations will not only gain a powerful tool in fighting the Somali pirates, but other incidents of terrorism around the world as well.

Recognizing piracy as an international crime will do something else: It will give individual states that don’t want to prosecute pirates an alternative — the international court. If pirates are recognized under their traditional international legal status — as neither ordinary criminals nor combatants, but enemies of the human race — states will have a much freer hand in capturing them. If piracy falls within the jurisdiction of the international court, states will not need to shoulder the burden of prosecution alone.

Today the world’s navies are hamstrung by conflicting laws and the absence of an international code. A comprehensive legal framework is the only way to break the stalemate off Somalia. In a trial before the Old Bailey in 1696, Dr. Henry Newton, the Admiralty advocate, declared, “Suffer pirates and the commerce of the world must cease.”

More than 300 years later, the world is suffering again. Fortunately, this time we have the answer.

Douglas R. Burgess Jr. is the author of “The Pirates’ Pact: The Secret Alliances Between History’s Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America.”
So, this is the country that got the Muslim world angry about the cartoons?
Danish Navy Rescues Suspected Pirates
NYTIMES
By ALAN COWELL
December 6, 2008

LONDON -- A Danish warship on patrol to thwart piracy in the Gulf of Aden ended up rescuing seven of its presumed prey when its crew found suspected Somali pirates adrift this week with a broken motor on their speedboat, the Danish Navy said on Friday.

Danish sailors brought the hungry, thirsty Somalis on board their own ship, a naval official said. Then they sank the speedboat.

The incident highlighted the challenges facing a small international flotilla patrolling vast expanses of ocean where pirates have struck with increasing audacity, hijacking vessels including a Ukrainian freighter laden with armaments and a supertanker carrying an estimated $100 million of crude oil.

Earlier this week, pirates chased and shot at an American cruise ship with more than 1,000 people on board but failed to hijack the vessel as it sailed along a corridor patrolled by the international warships, officials told The Associated Press.

The Danish warship, a combat support vessel called the HDMS Absalon, picked up the seven men about 90 miles off the coast of Yemen on Wednesday after a maritime patrol aircraft spotted them signaling in distress, said Lt. Cmdr. Jesper Lynge, a Danish Navy spokesman, in a telephone interview from Copenhagen.

But when Danish special forces from the Absalon went alongside the stricken speed-boat, they found rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles -- familiar pirate weapons -- which they confiscated.

“Their ship had been without propulsion for several days,” he said. “They were hungry and thirsty. We had them checked out by our doctor. We gave them blankets, food and water.”

But they did not arrest them.

“We had a situation where these guys were shipwrecked persons,” Lieutenant Commander Lynge said. “But we haven’t caught them in an act of piracy, and what their main purpose was -- your guess is as good as mine.”

The Danish crew handed them over early Friday to the Yemen coast guard, he said.

The Absalon, with a crew of 100, was deployed in the Gulf of Aden last September as part of an international effort to curb piracy.

The Danish actions followed another incident last month in which an Indian Navy warship sank what officials called a pirate “mother ship,” but later described by its owner as a hijacked Thai fishing trawler.

Negotiations are under way to free the Ukrainian freighter, the Faina, captured more than two months ago.

Last Sunday, Andrew Mwangura, who as head of a Kenyan maritime association has helped mediate the situation, said the Somali pirates who seized the Ukrainian vessel had agreed on a ransom with the ship’s owners. He would not reveal the figure, but he said that the only thing left was to figure out how to get the money to the pirates and hand over the ship.

The hijacked supertanker, the Sirius Star, is anchored a few miles off the coast of Somalia, near the town of Xarardheere. Its cargo of 2 million barrels of Saudi crude is worth about $100 million; the ship itself is worth more than $100 million. There are 25 crew members aboard. The pirates who seized it have been reported by news agencies to have demanded between $15 million and $25 million for its release.
Somali Pirates Fail to Hijack U.S. Cruise Liner
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:02 p.m. ET
December 2, 2008

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- The luxury American cruise ship steaming across the Gulf of Aden with hundreds of well-heeled tourists just might have been too much for Somali pirates to resist.

But the bandits, riding in two skiffs and firing rifle shots at the gleaming ship, were outrun in minutes when the captain of M/S Nautica gunned the engine and sped away, a spokesman for the company said Tuesday.

Still, the implications had the pirates hijacked the ship added a new dimension to the piracy scourge, as NATO foreign ministers groped for solutions at a meeting in Brussels and the United Nations extended an international piracy-fighting mandate for another year.

The potential for massive ransom payments from the families of hundreds of rich tourists may encourage similar attempts, especially following the successful capture of a Ukrainian cargo ship laden with tanks and a Saudi oil tanker carrying $100 million in crude.

And the brazen attack also raises questions: What was a cruise ship doing in the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden? How many such targets are sailing these seas, and how can they be protected?

Even the pirates' motives were in question: they could simply have been testing the defenses of the massive ship, rather than making a real effort to hijack it.

Sunday's attack on the M/S Nautica, which was reported Tuesday, comes several weeks after a NATO mission served mainly to underscore the impotence of the world community. A handful of Western ships can do little to prevent attacks in a vast sea, and without the right to board hijacked vessels, they can only watch as the booty is towed to port.

''It is very fortunate that the liner managed to escape,'' said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Malaysia, urging all ships to remain vigilant.

Some of the world's leading cruise companies said Tuesday they are considering changing their itineraries to avoid going near the coast of Somalia following news of the weekend attack.

Cunard's public relations manager Eric Flounders said the company has two liners, the Queen Mary 2 and Queen Victoria, scheduled to go through the Gulf of Aden in March but added the company ''will obviously consider changing the itinerary'' should the situation not improve.

Spokeswoman Michele Andjel said P&O Cruises is considering whether to reroute the Arcadia, which is due around the Gulf of Aden in January.

Lt. Nathan Christensen, a Bahrain-based spokesman for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, said 21,000 ships cross the Gulf of Aden every year, but he did not know how many cruise liners are included in that figure. The gulf links the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

''We are not advising ships to go a different way, but we do advise to go through the international corridor within the Gulf of Aden,'' Christensen said, referring to a security corridor patrolled by the international coalition.

Pirates have attacked about 100 ships off the Somali coast this year and hijacked 40 vessels. They still hold 14 ships along with more than 250 crew members, according to maritime officials.

NATO said an Italian destroyer prevented five cargo ships from being hijacked Tuesday in the Gulf of Aden by blocking the small pirate boats from the ships and using a helicopter to disperse them.

The Nautica is not the first pleasure boat to be attacked.

The luxury yacht Le Ponant was attacked earlier this year, and pirates opened fire in 2005 on the Seabourn Spirit off the Somali coast. The cruise ship evaded capture by using its speed and a long-range acoustic device that blasted a painful wave of sound at the pirates.

The Nautica also escaped by speeding up as two small pirate skiffs tried to close in, said Tim Rubacky, a spokesman for Oceania Cruises, Inc., which owns the Nautica. He said one skiff made it within 300 yards (275 meters) of the cruise ship and fired eight rifle shots at the vessel before trailing off.

''When the pirates were sighted, the captain went on the public address system and asked passengers to remain in the interior spaces of the ship and wait until he gave further instructions,'' Rubacky said. ''Within five minutes, it was over.''

He said the ship still plans to return through the Gulf of Aden.

''We believe this was an isolated incident,'' he said. ''M/S Nautica is well-equipped to deal with these situations and the crew is well-trained.''

However, Rubacky would not comment on the crew's training or whether the ship had weapons or other devices to help fight off a hijacking.

The Nautica was on a 32-day cruise from Rome to Singapore, with stops at ports in Italy, Egypt, Oman, Dubai, India, Malaysia and Thailand, according to Oceania's Web site. Choong said the ship was carrying 656 passengers and 399 crew members.

The liner arrived in the southern Oman port of Salalah on Monday morning, and passengers toured the city before leaving for the capital, Muscat, that evening, an Oman tourism official said.

In New York on Tuesday, the U.N. Security Council extended for another year its authorization for countries to enter Somalia's territorial waters, with advance notice, and use ''all necessary means'' to stop piracy and armed robbery at sea.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to address the Security Council on the subject of piracy at a followup session Dec. 16.

Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991, and pirates have taken advantage of the country's lawlessness to launch attacks on foreign shipping from the Somali coast.

In two of the most daring attacks, pirates seized a Ukrainian freighter loaded with 33 battle tanks and other heavy weapons in September and captured the Saudi oil tanker on Nov. 15.

On Tuesday, a Somali pirate spokesman said his group will release the Ukrainian ship and crew within the next two days after a ransom is paid.

Sugule Ali told The Associated Press by satellite phone on Tuesday that a ransom agreement had been reached, but would not say how much. The pirates had originally asked for $20 million when they hijacked the MV Faina.

''Once we receive this payment, we will also make sure that all our colleagues on ship reach land safely, then the release will take place,'' Ali said.

------

Associated Press writers Katharine Houreld in Nairobi, Kenya, Pan Pylas in London, Carley Petesch in New York, John Heilprin at the United Nations, Barbara Surk in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Saeed al-Nahdy in Muscat, Oman, contributed to this report.
Legal Hurdles in West Slow Pursuit of Pirates
NYTIMES
By NICHOLAS KULISH
November 29, 2008

BERLIN — Somali pirates firing automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades hijacked yet another ship in the Gulf of Aden on Friday, this time seizing a chemical tanker. A German military helicopter from a nearby warship arrived in time to pull three security guards out of the water, but not soon enough to prevent the hijacking of the ship and the rest of the crew.

The latest attack, in which even trained security personnel aboard could not deter the pirates, demonstrated the urgent need for coordinated action by governments from Cairo to Berlin. But the bureaucratic and legal hurdles facing international institutions and national governments have so far defeated most efforts to deal with the nimble crews of pirates in speedboats, whose tactics have grown bolder as their profits have paid for better weapons and equipment.

While the pirates have been buying GPS devices, satellite phones and more-powerful outboard motors, officials in Europe have been discussing jurisdictional issues surrounding the arrest of pirates on the high seas and even the possibility that the pirates might demand asylum if brought onto European Union shores.

Germany, perhaps more than any other country, epitomizes both the importance of safe passage for ships and the difficulty of reacting swiftly. It is the world’s leading exporter of goods, and according to the German Shipowners’ Association it has the world’s largest container-ship fleet, with some 36 percent of total container capacity.

That would seem to argue for swift action to stop the pirates, and Germany did indeed draw international attention earlier this week when it announced that up to 1,400 military personnel members might take part in the mission to combat piracy. But the figure significantly overstated the likely deployment as part of a European Union mission in the region, and Parliament has yet to approve it. It also remains to be seen whether the rules of engagement give German sailors a free enough hand to fight the pirates.

German law requires parliamentary approval for all troop deployments, an outgrowth of the country’s uneasiness with the use of military force after the aggression and crimes of the Nazi regime.

On Wednesday, government ministry officials, members of Parliament and representatives of the shipping industry and the workers’ unions gathered on a dark, rainy night in the imposing stone Reichstag building to debate the problem and the best course of action. In addition to the question of asylum, questions of extradition to other countries and how to proceed with potential prosecutions were high on the agenda.

“It is not only the case for Germany that these legal questions have to be clarified, but that also goes for the other countries,” said Vice Adm. Hans-Joachim Stricker, commander of the German fleet, in an interview shortly before the proceedings began. “That is being worked on under high pressure, and once these legal questions are clarified, then the operations can be ordered.”

But some legal experts in Germany said that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and an existing United Nations mandate to combat Somali piracy already provided all the legal cover necessary for muscular action against the pirates.

“The legal regime is in existence, sustainable, and there’s no problem with that,” said Rüdiger Wolfrum, professor and director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and a leading jurist here. “There is a certain political hesitation to forcefully engage in anti-pirate acts.”

If it gets approval, the German military is planning to send a frigate, the Karlsruhe, with some 220 seamen on board, to join in the European Union’s first naval mission, Operation Atalanta, named after the swift huntress of Greek legend. “At this point we are finalizing the operational plan,” said Cristina Gallach, spokeswoman for Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief.

Ms. Gallach said that half a dozen nations or more were expected to contribute to the mission and that its first tasks would probably begin Dec. 9, after the expected approval by the countries’ foreign ministers the day before. The presence is expected to include up to six frigates, three to five airplanes for maritime patrols and some 1,200 people in all, and the European Union hopes to coordinate actions with other navies operating in the region, including those from India, Russia and the United States.

But the Germans may not obtain the necessary approvals for their part of the plan in time to join the mission right away. Though the plan is expected to be approved before Christmas, the slowness of the process has frustrated some members of Parliament.

“I cannot believe that we could have this kind of problem, where pirates fool around with the international community,” said Bernd Siebert, a member of Parliament and a defense expert with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. “The bureaucratic obstacles and legal problems must be overcome. We have discussed this for too long.”

The capture of yet another ship on Friday, the chemical tanker Biscaglia, flying under the Liberian flag, underscored the point. The company that provided the security personnel for the ship, Anti Piracy Maritime Security Solutions, based in Poole, England, said in a statement after communicating with its team leader that “the ship came under sustained and heavy attack from automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.”

The security team had been using nonlethal means, including water cannons, to defend the ship. After getting the crew to a safe place, the men were unable to prevent the pirates from boarding and jumped overboard under fire, the statement said. The three men, two Britons and one Irishman, were rescued unharmed by a German military helicopter. Roughly 30 crew members were still on board the ship at the time of the hijacking, according to the International Maritime Bureau, which runs the Piracy Reporting Center.

A spokesman for the operations command of the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, confirmed that the Mecklenburg Vorpommern, a frigate operating in the region as part of the American-led antiterrorism mission, sent its helicopter to investigate after receiving an emergency call from the tanker. By the time the helicopter, a Sea Lynx Mk 88, arrived, the pirates had already boarded the tanker, the spokesman said, thereby precluding aggressive countermeasures for fear of the crew’s safety.

“From the time a crew on board spots the pirates to the time they actually board is usually only 15 minutes,” said Peter Lehr, an expert on piracy and maritime terrorism at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Mr. Lehr said that even the addition of the European Union naval mission would not be enough to secure the vast area. “A naval escort has to be nearby. As soon as they’re on board it’s too late to do anything.”

Forty ships have been confirmed as hijacked this year out of a total of close to 100 that have been attacked, according to the International Maritime Bureau. The most spectacular hijacking occurred two weeks ago, when pirates captured a Saudi-owned supertanker, the Sirius Star, worth $100 million and loaded with two million barrels of oil, worth another $100 million.

Pirates have already collected at least $25 million in ransom this year, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said last week. The Associated Press reported Friday that a Greek-owned cargo ship taken more than two months ago was released Thursday.
Oops!  Not a pirate ship after all?  Any connection to latest terror event in Mumbai?
Indian Navy Sinks Pirate Ship
NYTIMES
By HARI KUMAR and ALAN COWELL
November 20, 2008

NEW DELHI — As negotiations started for the release of a Saudi-owned supertanker seized by pirates off Somalia, the Indian Navy said on Wednesday that one of its warships fought a battle at sea with would-be hijackers in the Gulf of Aden, sinking one suspect vessel and forcing the pirates to abandon a second as they fled..

The drama on the night-time waters of the Indian Ocean late Tuesday underscored the growing international concern at the audacity with which armed pirates, mostly based in Somalia, range across vast areas of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, attacking at will.

The enormous Saudi-owned supertanker, Sirius Star, remained at anchor off the coast of Somalia on Wednesday, but there was no immediate word on the status of negotiations for its release.

In Rome, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, confirmed that the owners of the Star “are negotiating on the issue” and were “the final arbiter of the issue”, despite the Saudi government’s official opposition to such discussions with “pirates, terrorists or hijackers,” according to news reports. But he did not elaborate.

The ship is owned by Vela International, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based oil giant Saudi Aramco. At 1,080 feet, it is the largest ship known to have been seized by pirates. Its 25-member crew is made up of personnel from Britain, Poland, Croatia, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. The supertanker, about the same length as an American Nimitz class aircraft carrier, is fully loaded with two million barrels of oil valued at around $100 million. In a statement on Wednesday, Cmdr. Nirad Kumar Sinha, a spokesman for the Indian Navy, said an Indian warship, the INS Tabar, encountered a flotilla of three pirate vessels some 320 miles south west of the Omani coast in the Gulf of Aden in a separate incident on Tuesday evening. One ship was apparently a “mother ship” used by pirates to extend their range, with two speedboats in tow. The suspect vessel matched the description of a pirate vessel issued by international anti-piracy authorities, Commander Sinha said.

He said the ‘“whole operation lasted four to five hours” and was “the first such incident in which the Indian Navy sank the pirates’ mother ship.”

When the Indian vessel tried to halt the ship, he said, “the vessel’s threatening response was that she would blow up the naval warship” if it came closer.

“Pirates were seen roaming on the upper deck of this vessel with guns and rocket propelled grenade launchers,” Commander Sinha said. “The vessel continued its threatening calls and subsequently fired upon INS Tabar. On being fired upon, INS Tabar retaliated in self-defense and opened fire on the mother vessel.”

“As a result of the firing by INS Tabar, fire broke out on the vessel and explosions were heard, possibly due to exploding ammunition that was stored on the vessel. Almost simultaneously, two speedboats were observed breaking off to escape. The ship chased the first boat which was later found abandoned. The other boat made good its escape into darkness,” he said. There was no immediate word on casualties among the pirates.

The Indian account suggested that pirates had attacked the Tabar, deployed to repulse pirates — equaling the brazenness of the hijacking on Sunday of the Sirius Star.

At least eight ships have been hijacked in a vast expanse of ocean off the east African coastline in the past two weeks.

On the same day the Indian Navy engaged the pirates, a cargo ship registered in Hong Kong and loaded with 36,000 tons of wheat was seized in the Gulf of Aden, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported. The vessel, with 25 crew aboard, was headed for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

That hijacking was followed by a report Wednesday, still to be confirmed by Greek authorities, that a Greek bulk carrier had also been seized in the Gulf of Aden. A regional maritime group based in Mombasa, Kenya, told Reuters 23 to 25 crew were aboard that ship. The Associated Press also reported that a Thai fishing boat with 16 crew members had been seized off the coast of Somalia on Tuesday.

International anti-piracy patrols, deployed since August, have had occasional success.

Last week, a British frigate, the Cumberland, launched speedboats to intercept a hijacked dhow, exchanging fire with pirates before British naval personnel boarded it, the British Ministry of Defense said Tuesday. Eight alleged hijackers were captured and handed over to Kenyan authorities on Tuesday. Two people believed to be Somali nationals were killed in the operation, the ministry said.

The more aggressive actions by naval patrols were welcomed by international shipping organizations on Wednesday.

Cyrus Mody, of the International Maritime Bureau, which monitors global piracy, said in a telephone interview from London that the shipping industry had been urging stronger naval measures against the pirates’ “mother ships” for some time and would approve of the Indian Navy’s action. “This is the sort of action which should be taken to try to deal with the situation,” he said.

Peter Hinchliffe, the marine director of the International Chamber of Shipping in London, said in a separate telephone interview that the Indian Navy’s action “is going to start to bring the message home” to pirates “that the international community really is ranged against them.” However, he said, “we would prefer that the pirates are arrested and put through legal channels.”

This year, at least 92 ships have been attacked in and around the Gulf of Aden, more than triple the number in 2007, according to the International Maritime Bureau At least 14 of those ships, carrying more than 250 crew members, are still in the control of hijackers. They include a Ukrainian freighter loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition, which has been held hostage since late September.

An estimated $25 million to $30 million has been paid in ransom to Somali pirates this year, according to a report released Tuesday by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. But the cost is likely to spread to consumers as shipping companies face higher insurance bills inspired by the wave of piracy.

Brendan Flood, a marine underwriter for a specialist insurer Hiscox in London, said in a posting on the Lloyds’ insurance website: “With the general situation having deteriorated so quickly, insurance premiums for the hull, cargo and crew for vessels taking this increasingly dangerous route will be under pressure and will need to be reassessed.”
Maritime Hijackings Decrease in Asia
NYTIMES
By MARK McDONALD
November 19, 2008

HONG KONG — The hijacking of a Saudi supertanker has not led to alerts and alarms in Asia, which has weathered its own previous storms of piracy.

“It will be very difficult to copycat the Somalia situation in Asia,” said Noel Choong, head of the Piracy Reporting Center at the International Maritime Bureau in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “The governments here are more committed and have more resources. In fact, the attacks here are coming down.”

A regional piracy-monitoring agency in Singapore said maritime attacks in Asia in the first nine months of the year dropped 11 percent compared to 2007 and 32 percent from 2006.

Meanwhile, the hijacking of the Saudi tanker is just another red push-pin on the 2008 master piracy map maintained by the maritime bureau, a private group in the Malaysian capital.

The hundreds of pins denoting attacks and hijackings are heavily clustered in three regions — the Gulf of Aden and the eastern coast of Somalia; the coast of West Africa, particularly off Nigeria; and the Indonesian archipelago. But the vast majority of the incidents off Indonesia, and throughout Southeast Asia, are low-level attacks against small vessels, the petty theft of cargo or the robbery of crew members.

Maritime experts in Southeast Asia cite naval patrols by Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore — known in the anti-piracy business as “the littoral states” — for the significant reduction in attacks, and particularly a decrease in hijackings. Satellite monitoring also is used.

Stepped-up sea patrols began three years ago when pirates began to increase their attacks in the Strait of Malacca — the long, narrow funnel between peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Even large cargo vessels and tankers became vulnerable as pirates began to arm themselves with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

In 2005, the insurer Lloyds of London listed the strait as the world’s No. 1 hot spot for seagoing piracy — in effect declaring it a war zone — and placed an insurance premium on any ships using the passageway.

The losses from the attacks, the new vulnerability of tankers and the extra costs for insurance led to tremendous anxiety among ship captains, owners, insurers and governments. An estimated 40 percent of the world’s seaborne commerce moves through the strait, including shipments of oil from the Middle East to East Asia.

“If oil would get disrupted in the Malacca Straits, Japan would get very concerned because that’s their oil lifeline,” said Mr. Choong. The last major act of piracy in the Asia-Pacific region was in December 2005, Mr. Choong said, when a large chemical tanker was hijacked en route from Indonesia to Singapore. The ship had a “tracker” on board, the equivalent of an airplane transponder, and was quickly found in the South China Sea.

“With the tracker, she had nowhere to run,” Mr. Choong said. “The recovery of ships is very high in Asia.”

Piracy in the region still happens, of course. The more serious incidents involve the seagoing theft of oil or gas from small tankers. Typically, the ship is seized at night by lightly armed pirates in speedboats. The crew is then set adrift in lifeboats and the cargo is pumped into an accompanying pirate tanker. The stolen oil and gas is then sold in small amounts in regional villages and ports.

In a transcript from the maritime bureau, this minor incident in Kalimantan, Indonesia, was the only one reported from Asia in the last week: “Four robbers armed with catapults, knives and hacksaws boarded a bulk carrier at anchor. They threatened the duty crew with catapults and stole ship’s stores from forward locker. Alarm raised and ship’s whistle sounded. Robbers jumped overboard and escaped in a wooden fast boat. Incident reported to coastal authorities.”

“The severity is much greater in Somalia, where the pirates are very heavily armed, as compared to Southeast Asia, where the robbers usually just have knives,” said Lee Yin Mui, assistant director of research at the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships at Sea. The 16-nation network, known as ReCAAP, is based in Singapore.

In the first quarter of this year, the maritime bureau recorded 83 ships being hijacked or fired upon worldwide. The Gulf of Aden had more than half those attacks, 47 in all, while only two incidents occurred in the Straits of Malacca.

“Hijacking incidents here involve much smaller ships, usually tugboats which are slow-moving and easy to board,” Miss Lee said. “The pirates escape in their own boats. The crews are often abandoned on a remote beach. We see this as quite compassionate.”

In the most recent hijacking, Miss Lee said 15 pirates seized a Singaporean tugboat, the Whale 7, as it was towing a barge to Thailand.

ReCAAP and the maritime bureau in Malaysia issued alerts to ship captains and harbor masters in the region, and the boat was found three weeks later in Thailand. The tug had been renamed the Saga 01 and repainted — from a deep-water blue to traffic-cone orange. The Thai police arrested the pirates, who said they had been paid $35,000 to seize the tug.
Hijacked Supertanker Drops Anchor
NYTIMES
By ROBERT F. WORTH and MARK McDONALD
November 19, 2008

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — A hijacked Saudi-owned supertanker carrying more than $100 million worth of crude oil is believed to have anchored off Somalia and its owners are working toward “the safe and speedy return” of the 25 crew, the owners said Tuesday.

A statement from Vela International, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based oil giant Saudi Aramco, said the company was “awaiting further contact from the pirates in control of the vessel” who seized it some 480 miles off the coast of Somalia. Earlier reports said the 1,080-foot Sirius Star had been hijacked off the Kenyan coast.

The statement did not say specifically that negotiations with the hijackers had started. The supertanker, about the same length as an American Nimitz class aircraft carrier, is the largest ship known to have been seized by pirates.

The statement from Vela International, issued in Dubai, quoted the company’s president and chief executive, Salah B. Ka’aki, as saying the company’s “first and foremost priority is ensuring the safety of the crew. We are in communication with their families and are working toward their safe and speedy return." The crew is composed of 2 British, 2 Polish, 1 Croatian, 1 Saudi and 19 Philippines nationals.

“Vela continues to monitor the situation and coordinate with the relevant embassies. At this time, Vela is awaiting further contact from the pirates in control of the vessel,” the statement said.

Earlier, Cmdr. Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, stationed in Bahrain said that if the hijacking follows the pattern of previous attacks, the ship would anchor and “negotiations will begin between the pirates and the owners of ship.”

Although the supertanker’s exact location near the Somali coast was not clear, in the past most pirates have brought hijacked vessels to a stretch of coastline between Eyl in the north to the Harradera region to the south, Commander Campbell said in a telephone interview.

The hijacking follows a string of increasingly brazen attacks by Somali pirates in recent months, but this appeared to be the first time that pirates have seized a loaded oil tanker.

Asked about a possible naval intervention, Commander Campbell said: “Once the attack takes place, this is a hostage situation, and there are 25 crew members on board that ship. As with any hostage situation, there has to be concern for those individuals.”

Negotiations with pirates have often taken weeks or even months. A Ukrainian vessel hijacked in September, loaded with tanks and other heavy weapons, is still being held at Hobyo on the Somali coast, where the ship’s crew remain captives, Commander Campbell said.

According to the International Maritime Bureau, a global clearinghouse for piracy reporting based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, , 88 ships have been attacked in the Gulf of Aden alone this year. And 14 hijacked ships remain in the gulf — the heavily armed hijackers still on board, with the crews, cargo and the vessels themselves being held for ransom.

“They’re still at sea and still negotiating,” said Noel Choong, the head of the bureau’s piracy reporting center. As ransom payoffs have risen, he said, pirates have increased their demands. “They know the going rate.”

Only a few years ago, the average ransom was in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now payments can range from $500,000 to $2 million.

The pirates’ profits are set to reach a record $50 million in 2008, Somali officials say. Shipping firms are usually prepared to pay, because the sums are low compared with the value of the ships.

The attack on the Sirius Star took place despite an increased multinational naval presence off the Somali coast, where most of the recent hijackings have taken place. The pirates, often armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, travel in speedboats equipped with satellite phones and GPS equipment.

The location of the latest attack, far out to sea, suggested that the pirates may be expanding their range in an effort to avoid the multinational naval patrols now plying the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.

“I’m stunned by the range of it,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference in Washington. The ship’s distance from the coast was “the longest distance I’ve seen for any of these incidents,” he said.

The vessel was headed for the United States when it was seized, Reuters reported.

Maritime experts recently have noticed a new development in the gulf — the pirates’ use of “mother ships,” large oceangoing trawlers carrying fleets of speedboats which are then deployed when a new prize is encountered.

“They launch these boats and they’re like wild dogs,” said Mr. Choong in Kuala Lumpur. “They attack the ship from the port, from starboard, from all points, shooting, scaring the captain, firing RPGs and forcing the ship to stop.”

There are some countermeasures the merchant ships can use when approaching pirates are spotted. Fire-retardant foam or huge blasts of water can be sprayed from the ship to douse the would-be hijackers.

Once pirates get aboard, however, the ship is theirs, because crews on commercial vessels are rarely armed, according to Mr. Choong and other maritime experts. “They are not mentally or physically fit enough to handle weapons,” he said.

Nor do many ship owners use armed contractors — seagoing mercenaries — to fight or ward off approaching pirates. Experts said crew safety and insurance liability were overriding concerns of captains and owners.

“We do not advocate this, having armed escorts on board,” said Lee Yin Mui, assistant director of research at the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships at Sea. Known as ReCAAP, the 16-nation network is based in Singapore.

“Armed escorts could only escalate the situation,” she said, “and perhaps trigger off heavy crossfire.”

INDIA

View of the pool at the Taj Mahal Hotel.  Photo from several years ago, prior to terror assault, by WestportNow photographer.


Indian Police Disclose More Suicide Attackers
NYTIMES
By JEREMY KAHN and ROBERT F. WORTH
December 10, 2008

MUMBAI, India — The Mumbai police said Tuesday that the 10 men who carried out the terrorist attacks here belonged to a group of 30 recruits of the Lashkar-e-Taiba Pakistani militant organization who had been selected for suicide missions, and that the whereabouts of the other 20 were unknown.

It was the first time that the Indian police had disclosed the larger number of suicide recruits, and while they said there was no reason to believe that the other 20 were in India, they expressed concern about such a possibility.

"Another 20 were ready to die," said Deven Bharti, a Mumbai Police deputy commissioner, in an interview. “This is the very disturbing part of it.”

The Indian police have consistently maintained that only 10 gunmen participated in the Nov. 26-29 attacks in Mumbai that left 171 people dead and raised tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan to the the highest in years.

Mr. Bharti said the information about the other recruits came from the sole surviving attacker, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, who was arrested during the attacks and has been in police custody ever since.

The deputy commissioner also said that based on the questioning of Mr. Kasab, the 30 recruits were provided with highly specialized training, including learning marine combat skills.

Once Mr. Kasab and his nine fellow attackers were selected by Lashkar leaders, they were kept sequestered in a house for three months, the deputy commissioner said. Here they were further divided into two-man teams, each team assigned a different target within Mumbai to attack, information that they were forbidden from sharing with one another. They never saw the other 20 trainees again, the deputy commissioner said, according to the information provided by Mr. Kasab.

The Indian police also on Tuesday provided further names and photographs of the Mumbai attackers, and supplied new details of the weaponry and communications and navigation equipment that they used during their assault.

The authorities had already identified two of the Mumbai gunmen, including Mr. Kasab, the lone survivor from the attacks, from the village of Faridkot, and Ismail Khan, from Deira Ismail Khan.

Each of the men had aliases, and they knew each other only by those aliases during their training, the police said. Only in the final few days before the attack, while they traveled by boat from the port of Karachi in Pakistan across the Arabian Sea to Mumbai, did they learn each others’ true names, said Rakesh Maria, Mumbai’s joint police commissioner.

At a news conference in Mumbai, Mr. Maria said the attackers carried a dozen grenades, a 9 mm handgun with two 18 round clips and an AK-47, along with seven to nine 30 round magazines, in addition to more than 100 rounds of loose ammunition. Mr. Maria had said previously that each terrorist also carried an 8 kilogram bomb. Three of these bombs were recovered and diffused, while the others exploded at various locations around the city, according to the police.

As the Indian police gave more information about the attackers, the Pakistani government publicly confirmed for the first time on Tuesday that its forces had seized two militant leaders, including the operational commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The confirmation of the arrest of the Lashkar leader, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, was made by Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmad Mukhtar in an interview on Indian television. It was the furthest the authorities in Pakistan have yet gone in publicly acknowledging the possible complicity of Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Mumbai attacks.

Mr. Mukhtar identified the second militant leader arrested as Masood Azhar, head of Jaish-e-Muhammad, another banned militant group based in Pakistan.

Mr. Azhar, who was freed in 1999 in exchange for hostages on a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar, Afghanistan, was on a list presented to Pakistan by the Indian government days after the attacks in Mumbai. The list contained the names of 20 suspects wanted in connection with other terrorist attacks and pending criminal cases.

Mr. Lakhvi “has been picked up,” Mr. Mukhtar said, according to the television channel, CNN-IBN. “About Masood Azhar, I don’t think we had decided yesterday to pick him up but our president is determined that we remove all irritants and as a small irritant he has been picked up.” He said that President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan was “determined that we must cooperate with India.”

Mr. Zardari himself, in an op-ed article published in the Tuesday edition of The New York Times, said Pakistan feels India’s pain and that Pakistan “is committed to the pursuit, arrest, trial and punishment of anyone involved in these heinous attacks.” But Mr. Zardari also cautioned India against what he called “hasty judgments and inflammatory statements.”

After mounting pressure from the United States and India, Pakistani authorities on Sunday raided a camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group, in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, Pakistani and American officials said.

That operation appeared to be Pakistan’s first concrete response to the demands from India and the United States to take action against the militants suspected in the attacks.

Since then, the authorities have carried out raids on at least five more offices of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Associated Press reported Tuesday, citing an unidentified senior Pakistani security official. The official said that 20 more people had been arrested.

It was unclear from the defense minister’s remarks whether Mr. Lakhvi was detained in the first raid on Sunday. Lashkar-e-Taiba was founded 20 years ago with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies as a proxy force to challenge Indian control of part of Muslim-dominated Kashmir.

American intelligence and counterterrorism officials told The New York Times that Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, continued nurturing the group, even after 9/11, when the Pakistani government pledged to sever its ties with militant groups.

While investigators and intelligence officials say there is no hard evidence linking Pakistan’s spy agency to the Mumbai attacks, they have pointed to Lashkar as the likely culprit.

Jeremy Kahn and Robert F. Worth reported from Mumbai, India. Reporting was contributed by Jane Perlez in Islamabad, Pakistan; Graham Bowley in New York; Eric Schmitt in Washington; Yusuf Jameel in Srinagar, Kashmir; and Salman Masood in Islamabad, Pakistan.
India Acknowledges Errors in Security Response to Attacks
NYTIMES
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and JANE PERLEZ
December 6, 2008

MUMBAI, India — India conceded Friday that the devastating terrorist attacks on Mumbai last week revealed “lapses” in its security arrangements, while the country’s prime minister articulated the scale of anger and grievance stirred by the attacks in the Indian public.

“The people of India feel a sense of hurt and anger as never before,” said the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, at a news conference in New Delhi.

That anger has been directed in part at India’s neighbor, Pakistan, where Indian and American officials believe the attackers received training, and Mr. Manmohan said on Friday that other countries around the world should now confront Pakistan over the alleged presence of terrorists on its soil.

“We expect the world community to come to the same conclusion, that the territory of a neighboring country has been used for this crime,” he said, referring to Pakistan.

But the anger is also focused domestically too, as Indians rage at their government for not having done more to protect them.  In the most public outrage so far, tens of thousands in Mumbai marched near the attacked sites on Wednesday, while similar rallies were held in New Delhi and in the southern technology hubs of Bangalore and Hyderabad.  Speaking in Mumbai on Friday, India’s new home minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, admitted that there had been “lapses” in the way India handled the crisis and said his government was trying to “improve the effectiveness of the security systems.”

“There have been lapses,” he told reporters. “I would be less than truthful if I said there had been no lapses.”

Questions raised include why Indian intelligence had no forewarning of the plot, why security was so loose at the sites attacked in Mumbai, and why Indian security forces were so poorly armed — and in some cases so slow to respond.  Meanwhile, evidence linking the attackers to Pakistan builds. Fresh evidence unearthed by investigators in India has indicated that the Mumbai attacks were stage-managed from at least two Pakistani cities by top leaders of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Indian and American intelligence officials have already identified a Lashkar operative, who goes by the name Yusuf Muzammil, as a mastermind of the attacks. On Thursday, Indian investigators named one of the most well-known senior figures in Lashkar, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi.  The names of both men came from the interrogations of the one surviving attacker, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, according to police officials in Mumbai.

While Mr. Muzammil appears to have served as a control officer in Lahore, Pakistan, Mr. Lakhvi, his boss and the operational commander of Lashkar, worked from Karachi, a southern Pakistani port city, said investigators in Mumbai.  It now appears that both men were in contact with their charges as they sailed to Mumbai from Karachi, and then continued guiding the attacks even as they unfolded, directing the assaults and possibly providing information about the police and military response in India.

Some of the calls appeared to be conversations about who would live and who would die among the gunmen’s hostages, according to an official who interviewed survivors and a report by security consultants with contacts among the investigators.  While Indian officials have pointed a finger directly at Pakistani elements, terrorism experts and some Western officials warned that the emerging sketch of the plotters was still preliminary and could broaden even to include militants within India. India, too, has a long history of antagonism with Pakistan.

In Mumbai, meanwhile, Mr. Chidambaram issued a lower tally on Friday for casualties in the attacks, saying 163 people — including 18 members of the security forces — died along with nine suspected terrorists. The number of injured was 293, he said. Previous accounts put the death count among the attackers’ victims at more than 170.  On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in Islamabad with Pakistani leaders, a day after meeting with Indian leaders, to urge that the two countries work together to find the attackers’ commanders and bring them to justice.

“What I heard was a commitment that this is the course that will be taken,” Ms. Rice told reporters at Chaklala Air Base in Pakistan after meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

But while Pakistan’s leaders offered polite assurances, they made no public announcement of concrete measures to be taken against Lashkar. They have also continued to express skepticism of Pakistani involvement and have resisted handing over 20 suspects demanded by India.  Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose name means “army of the pure,” was founded with the help of Pakistani intelligence officers more than 20 years ago as a proxy force to challenge Indian control of Muslim-dominated Kashmir.

Since then, the group has broadened its ambitions, its reach and its contacts with an international network of jihadi groups. Its fighters have turned up in Afghanistan and Iraq and have been blamed for several other high-profile attacks in India before.

Today it is technically banned in Pakistan but operates openly through affiliates. Its links to Al Qaeda remain murky, as does the extent of its current ties to Pakistan’s main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

In an interview this week, Muhammad Yahya Mujahid, a spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a parent organization of Lashkar, denied that Lashkar or its leader, Haffiz Muhammad Saeed, had any connection to the attack. The surviving gunman in Mumbai claimed to have met Mr. Saeed at a training camp in Pakistan.  American counterterrorism officials said there was no clear evidence that the Pakistani intelligence service played a role in the Mumbai attacks, or that Pakistani operatives were linked to the attackers.

Deven Bharti, a deputy commissioner on the Mumbai police force, would not comment on Indian media reports claiming direct links between the ISI and the Mumbai attacks.

But, he said, “we have certain evidence of government complicity that we are trying to verify.”

The weapons used in the attacks, he said, came from a factory based in Punjab Province in Pakistan that is under contract to the Pakistani military, he said.  The factory was also the source of grenades and explosives used in several earlier terrorist attacks in India, Mr. Bharti said. Those included bombings in Mumbai in 1993; a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in July, he said.  Investigators discovered the link to the Pakistan factory, Mr. Bharti said, after recovering a grenade left by the attackers that had EN ARGES printed on it.

That corresponds to a brand name belonging to a German company that granted a license to the factory to make weapons for the Pakistani military.

One possible collaborator in the plot, the authorities say, was an Indian named Faheem Ahmed Ansari, who was arrested in February in a northern Indian state, Uttar Pradesh, along with two other suspected Lashkar members.  Mr. Ansari told the police interrogators that from fall 2007 to February 2008 he surveyed possible targets for Lashkar in Mumbai, including the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria rail station.

The Uttar Pradesh police said he was arrested in connection with a gun and grenade attack on New Year’s Eve on a police camp in Rampur when he returned to pick up weapons left behind. His intention was to take the weapons to Mumbai for use in a later operation, they said.  Other evidence emerged Thursday highlighting the sophistication and cruelty of the attacks.

Some of the six people killed at the Jewish center in the city had been treated particularly savagely, the police said, with bodies bearing what appeared to be strangulation marks and other wounds that did not come from gunshots or grenades.

Even before the attackers landed on Mumbai’s shores, Mr. Lakhvi, the Lashkar commander, who is normally based in Kashmir, helped organize the plot from Karachi for the last three months, said a Pakistani official in contact with Lashkar.   The gunmen also kept in contact with their handlers in Pakistan with cellphones as they rounded up guests at the two hotels, officials say.  The attackers left a trail of evidence in a satellite phone they left behind on the fishing trawler they hijacked near Karachi at the start of their 500-mile journey to Mumbai.

The phone contained the telephone numbers of Mr. Muzammil, Mr. Lakhvi and a number of other Lashkar operatives, according to a report on the Mumbai siege released Thursday by M. J. Gohel and Sajjan M. Gohel, two security analysts who direct the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London.  The numbers dialed on the phone found on the trawler used to call Mr. Muzammil matched the numbers on the cellphones recovered from the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the report said.

Based on evidence found on the trawler, it was possible that five other men were involved in the plot and were still at large, the report said.  In one of the hotels, a gunman asked several Indian guests what caste they belonged to and what state they came from, said an official who interviewed the guests.

Once the attacker found out these details, he then called someone believed to be Mr. Muzammil, who was also identified by the surviving gunman and who was in Lahore, according to phone records recovered by investigators.  The surviving guests said the attacker told the person on the other end of the phone the guests’ details and asked whether they should be killed or not.

At one point, a guest said one of the calls seemed to be a conference call with two people on the other end.

Once the calls were finished, the attacker moved the small group of guests, who did not know what their fate would be, into a room. When the attackers became distracted by tear gas fired by the police, the hostages managed to escape.  In another instance, the gunmen forced a Singaporean hostage at the Oberoi hotel, Lo Hwei Yen, to call her husband in Singapore. She told him that the hostages were demanding that Singaporean officials tell India not to try a rescue operation. The next day, Ms. Lo was killed, the foundation’s report said.

Investigators found that after the gunmen killed her, they used the phone she had called her husband with, the report said.

“The worrying scenario is that Muzammil may have ordered her execution along with two other hostages that were found murdered in the same room,” the report said.

Somini Sengupta reported from Mumbai, India, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad. Reporting was contributed by Robert F. Worth and Jeremy Kahn from Mumbai; Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Salman Masood from Islamabad; Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Graham Bowley from New York.
More Mumbai Links to Pakistan and Signs of Hostage Abuse
NYTIMES
By JEREMY KAHN and SALMAN MASOOD
December 5, 2008

MUMBAI, India — The Mumbai police on Thursday identified a second Pakistani terrorist as an engineer of the bloody assaults on the city last week and confirmed that they were investigating whether a Mumbai man arrested on terrorism charges had scoped out some of the high-profile targets the attackers struck, leaving more than 170 dead.

Gruesome new evidence also emerged Thursday suggesting that some of the six people killed at the Jewish center in Mumbai had been treated savagely. Some of the bodies appeared to have strangulation marks and wounds on their bodies did not come from gunshots or grenades, the police said.

The new links to Pakistan added fresh complications to American diplomatic efforts to secure cooperation between India and Pakistan, which has questioned some of the evidence that Pakistanis were involved. On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in Islamabad with Pakistani leaders, a day after meeting with Indian leaders, to urge that the two countries work together to find the attackers and bring them to justice.

“What I heard was a commitment that this is the course that will be taken,” Ms. Rice told reporters at Chaklala Air Base after meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

Ms. Rice’s brief visit to Pakistan completed a delicate diplomatic minuet with visits to the region by the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who was in Pakistan on Wednesday and flew to India on Thursday for meetings.

In Mumbai, Rakesh Maria, India’s joint commissioner of police, said that the second Lashkar-e-Taiba military commander who helped engineer the attacks was Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. Mr. Maria said that the surviving attacker, 21-year-old Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, identified Mr. Lakhvi and said he helped indoctrinate all the attackers.  Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani guerrilla group that long focused on the disputed territory of Kashmir, is officially banned in Pakistan but, with a history of links to Pakistan’s intelligence, has been hiding in plain sight for years. On Thursday, a spokesman for the group’s leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, denied involvement in the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani news media reported.

Mr. Maria also said that it was believed that the attackers were in contact with Mr. Lakhvi on their journey from Karachi to Mumbai by sea and may have been during the attacks as well. Indian and American intelligence officials have already identified another Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, Yusuf Muzammil, as a mastermind of the attacks, and said he was in contact by satellite phone with the attackers during their journey.

Another police official, Deven Bharti, said the interrogation of Mr. Kasab, the captured gunman, was focusing on three lines of inquiry: the identities of the other nine; their training and planning; and whether they had local accomplices.  The suspected collaborator, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, was arrested on Feb. 10 in Rampur in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh a in connection with gun and grenade attack on New Year’s Eve on a police camp. He was arrested with two others; all three are suspected members of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Mr. Ansari told police interrogators in Uttar Pradesh that from fall 2007 to February 2008, he had been in Mumbai scoping out possible targets for the guerrilla group, including the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria rail station.

The Uttar Pradesh police said that Mr. Ansari was arrested after he returned to Rampur to pick up weapons left behind from the New Year’s Eve attack and take them to Mumbai for use in a later operation.

Ms Rice, during talks with Pakistani leaders, stressed that Pakistan should be seen as acting sincerely and quickly.

“Pakistan should also take the necessary steps to prevent any non-state actors from indulging in such activities against any country from its soil,” Ms. Rice said, according to a statement from the Pakistani prime minister’s office.

At the news conference in Chaklala, Ms. Rice said that the Indian government is concerned and determined “to find the perpetrators, bring them to justice, determined to prevent the next attack.”

“I found the Pakistani leadership understanding the importance of doing so. Particularly in rooting out terrorists and rounding up whoever perpetrated this attack, from wherever it was perpetrated, whatever its sources, whatever the leads, because everybody wants to prevent further attacks,” she said.

For his part, Mr. Zardari told Ms. Rice that he will take “strong action against any Pakistani elements found involved in the Mumbai attacks,” according to a spokesperson for the Pakistani president.

Ms. Rice said Pakistan should be seen as acting sincerely and quickly.

Within India, sharp questions have been raised about the stunning inadequacy of Indian security forces and intelligence services. On Thursday, the Indian Air Force chief, Fali Homar Major told reporters that new intelligence reports had persuaded the authorities to declare an alert at airports. “This is based on a little warning that has been received,” he said. “We are prepared as usual.”

He offered no further details, but an Indian television network, NDTV, said the warning related to what it called a “9/11” plot timed to coincide with the anniversary on Dec. 6 of the destruction by Hindu militants of the Babri mosque in northern India in 1992.

News reports on Thursday said six airports, including those at New Delhi and Mumbai, were on alert, with heightened security searches for passengers and warplanes ready to take to the skies.

Jeremy Kahn reported from Mumbai, India, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Somini Sengupta and Robert F. Worth from Mumbai, India; Jane Perlez from Lahore, Pakistan; Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Eric Schmitt from Washington and Alan Cowell from London.
VIDEO REPORT FROM SKY NEWS HERE
More on the Captured Gunman
NYTIMES
By Sharon Otterman
December 2, 2008, 10:57 am

Indian police and government officials are beginning to speak on the record about the information they have gleaned from Ajmal Amir Qasab, the only gunman to be captured in the Mumbai terrorist attacks last week, as well as other aspects of the ongoing investigation.

Hassan Gafoor, the Mumbai police commissioner, told a news conference on Tuesday: “There were 10 terrorists in five groups of two members each, who had come from Karachi in boats. They later hired five taxis to get to their destination.”

He said the terrorists came from Pakistan and that they were trained for over a year by ex-Army personnel, according to a Sky News account of the press conference. The information tracks closely with what unnamed officials have been telling reporters about Mr. Qasab’s interrogation.

“They were carrying five time bombs,” Mr. Gafoor said. “Two exploded in taxis in Vile Parle and Dockyard Road. One bomb was placed inside Oberoi hotel, one near Taj hotel.”


Rakesh Maria, joint commissioner of the Mumbai police, held a news conference on Monday, confirming that Mr. Qasab said he was a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based Islamist militant group, and that he believed all of the attackers were from Pakistan.

More images of the gunman and his capture have also emerged.

Grainy closed circuit television footage released Tuesday shows Mr. Qasab and an accomplice — named by reports in the Indian media as Abu Ismail Dera Ismail Khan, 25 — opening fire at Mumbai’s main train station, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Another segment shows the gunmen firing at Indian police.

Sky News also has video images released Monday of the capture of Mr. Qasab by police, shot on a mobile-phone camera.

And Gulf News has an interview with Sebastian D’Souza, the Mumbai Mirror photographer who took the chilling photographs of Mr. Qasab in the train station. Mr. D’Souza jumped from train to train on the platform, evading gunfire, in order to get the photographs, which show Mr. Qasab advancing, wearing cargo pants, a Versace T-shirt and black sneakers, with an assault rifle in hand.
US Official: India Knew of Plot on Mumbai's Coast
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:19 p.m. ET
December 2, 2008

MUMBAI, India (AP) -- India received a warning from the United States before last week's attacks in Mumbai that militants were plotting a waterborne assault on the city, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday as domestic intelligence officials said they were aware of a Pakistan-based plot.

Another U.S. official added that there is reason to suspect the assailants were part of a group at least partly based across the border in Pakistan.

As the evidence of the militants' links to Pakistan mounts, a list of about 20 people -- including India's most-wanted man -- was submitted to Pakistan's high commissioner to New Delhi on Monday night, said India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee.

The revelations come as the Indian government faces widespread accusations of security and intelligence failures after suspected Muslim militants carried out a three-day attack across India's financial capital, killing at least 172 people -- including six Americans -- and wounding 239.

India has already demanded Pakistan take ''strong action'' against those responsible for the attacks, and the U.S. has pressured Islamabad to cooperate in the investigation. America's chief diplomat, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, will visit India on Wednesday.  A Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of intelligence information, said Tuesday that the U.S. passed on information to India about a potential attack on Mumbai from its long waterfront. But the official would not elaborate on the timing or details of the U.S. warning to Indian counterparts.

Another American official said the assailants could have been at least partly based in Pakistan -- the closest the U.S. has come to laying blame for the attacks. The State Department official, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, was careful to say not all the evidence is in.

Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Israelis began burying the six Jews killed in one of those attacks, the assault on a Jewish center run by the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement.

Several thousand ultra-Orthodox mourners gathered for the first funeral, that of Leibish Teitelbaum, an American who lived in Jerusalem.  Four Israelis and a Mexican Jewish woman were also killed. A memorial ceremony was scheduled for later Wednesday for the 29-year-old rabbi who ran the Jewish center, Gavriel Holtzberg, and his 28-year-old wife, Rivkah.

Indian officials continued to interrogate the only surviving attacker, who reportedly told police that he and the other nine gunmen had trained for months in camps in Pakistan operated by the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

India's foreign intelligence agency received information as recently as September that Pakistan-based terrorists were plotting attacks against Mumbai targets, according to a government intelligence official familiar with the matter. He said the information, which he attributed to Indian sources and not the Americans, included indications that hotels would be targeted but did not specify which ones.  The information was then relayed to domestic security authorities, said the official, who was not authorized to talk publicly about the details and spoke on condition of anonymity. But it's unclear whether the government acted on the intelligence.

The famous Taj Mahal hotel, scene of much of the bloodshed, had tightened security with metal detectors and other measures in the weeks before the attacks, after being warned of a possible threat.

But the precautions ''could not have stopped what took place,'' Ratan Tata, chairman of the company that owns the hotel, told CNN. ''They (the gunmen) didn't come through that entrance. They came from somewhere in the back.''

A day after soldiers finishing removed the last bodies from the hotel, where the standoff finally ended Saturday morning, wood boards covered its marble latticework and seafront entrance as plainclothes police searched for evidence.  The building was the last to be cleared, following the five-star Oberoi hotel, the Jewish center, and other sites struck in this city of 18 million.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has promised to strengthen maritime and air security and look into creating a new federal investigative agency, met Tuesday with top security aides to review any government lapses.  Among those sought by India is fugitive Dawood Ibrahim -- a powerful gangster, the alleged mastermind of 1993 Mumbai bombings, and India's most-wanted man.  Also included is Masood Azhar, a terror suspect freed from an Indian prison in exchange for the release of hostages aboard an Indian Airlines aircraft hijacked on Christmas Day 1999.

In the past, Pakistan has denied harboring the men. However, Pakistan said it would consider India's request and respond after receiving the list.

''We must try to dampen down the discourse of conflict and work toward regional peace,'' said Pakistani Information Minister Sherry Rehman.

While the cross-border rhetoric between Pakistan and India has increased since the attacks, both countries -- by their often-bellicose standards -- carefully refrained from making statements that could quickly lead to a buildup of troops along their already militarized frontier.  Mukherjee appeared to tone things down further Tuesday, telling reporters that ''nobody is talking about military action,'' according to the Press Trust of India news agency. Mukherjee, responding to questions on what actions India would take, said only ''time will show.''

In Pakistan, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi pledged full cooperation.

Qureshi said Pakistan has offered a ''joint investigative mechanism and joint commission.'' He didn't say when the offer was made or if India had responded.  With the investigation still under way, and FBI and Scotland Yard teams assisting, more details emerged about the suspects and the attacks.

The sole surviving attacker, Ajmal Qasab, told police his group trained over about six months in camps operated by Lashkar in Pakistan, learning close-combat techniques, hostage-taking, handling of explosives, satellite navigation, and high-seas survival skills, according to two Indian security officials familiar with the investigation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the details.

Lashkar was outlawed in Pakistan under pressure from the U.S. in 2002, a year after Washington and Britain listed it a terrorist group.  Qasab told investigators the militants hijacked an Indian vessel and killed three crew members, keeping the captain alive long enough to guide them into Mumbai, the two security officials said.  The men, ages 18-28, then came ashore in a dinghy at two different Mumbai areas before slipping into the city in two teams, officials said.

The gunmen hired two separate taxis after reaching Mumbai, planting bombs that later exploded in each vehicle, officials said. Two more unexploded bombs were found outside the Taj Mahal hotel.  The gunmen struck at several sites, including a train station, where they mowed down police and passers-by; the Jewish center; and the two luxury hotels, representing the city's wealth and tourism, reportedly seeking out Westerners.

The 19 foreigners killed were Americans, Germans, Canadians, Israelis and nationals from Britain, Italy, Mexico, Japan, China, Thailand, Australia, Singapore and Mexico.

------

Associated Press writers Ravi Nessman in Mumbai, Ashok Sharma in New Delhi, Asif Shahzad in Islamabad, Pakistan, Anne Gearan in Brussels, Belgium, and Jennifer Loven in Washington contributed to this report.
Analysts Say It Will Be Difficult to Shield Luxury Hotels From Terrorist Attacks
NYTIMES
By KEITH BRADSHER
December 1, 2008

MUMBAI, India — For decades, luxury hotels have been oases for travelers in developing countries, places to mingle with the local elite, enjoy a lavish meal or a dip in the pool and sleep in a clean, safe room.

But last week’s lethal attacks on two of India’s most famous hotels — coming just two months after a huge truck bomb devastated the Marriott in Islamabad, Pakistan — have underlined the extent to which these hotels are becoming magnets for terrorists. Worse, hotel executives and security experts say that little can be done to stop extensively trained gunmen with military assault rifles and grenades who launch attacks like the ones that left this city’s Oberoi and Taj Mahal Palace & Tower strewn with bodies.

P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, said at a news conference over the weekend that he had directed his company’s hotels to step up security after the Islamabad bombing. The Oberoi banned anyone from parking in front of its hotel here for fear that a car bomb could destroy the glass wall at the front of the lobby, a risk at many hotels.

But those protections did not deter the attackers, who entered the Oberoi on foot.

Mr. Oberoi questioned whether any hotel could defend against such an assault.

“The authorities have to help us,” he said, by preventing attacks from occurring at all.

The Taj, it turns out, had warning, according to both an Indian government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and Ratan Tata, the chairman of the company that owns the hotel. In an interview on CNN, Mr. Tata said the hotel had temporarily increased security after being warned of a possible terrorist attack. But he said those measures were eased shortly before last week’s attacks and could not have prevented gunmen from entering the hotel.

American hotel chains have policies against discussing security precautions, but watched the Mumbai hotel sieges closely.

“We never talk about security measures in our hotels because to talk about what we do would compromise them, but I think it’s fair to say what happened in Mumbai is going to re-energize them,” said Vivian Deuschl, the spokeswoman for the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, a Marriott subsidiary.

Some hotels in Asia already take elaborate precautions, particularly in countries with histories of attacks on Western luxury hotels.

At the Grand Hyatt in Jakarta, Indonesia, for example, guards check the trunks of all vehicles and even use mirrors to check cars’ underbodies for explosives before letting them drive to the entrance. Guests’ baggage is opened and checked by hand for suspicious objects, and everyone must go through a metal detector before entering the building.

In Pakistan’s major cities, where hotels have been targets before, already-tight security at some hotels has become even more intrusive since the Marriott bombing. Guests have to pass through at least one, and often, several security checkpoints on their way into the hotels; some are staffed by paramilitaries. At the luxury Serena Hotel in Islamabad, those who wish to enter are grilled about where they are going and whom they are meeting.

But security experts say such measures — and even some lesser ones — will be difficult to implement outside of war zones or countries where hotels have already been made targets, even after the attacks in Mumbai.

“It is incredibly difficult to have a quick-fix solution to what we saw,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert with the Swedish National Defense College. “You are stuck with the dilemma of having a complete lockdown. Tourists don’t want that. They want to participate in the culture, they want to experience it.”

Hotels have some built-in design problems for those seeking to protect them from terrorists. Long hallways can turn into dangerous mazes during the type of attacks that occurred in Mumbai. And the Oberoi and the old wing of the Taj hotel, where most of the fighting took place, both have high, central atriums, as many hotels do. This proved to be a vulnerability.

After throwing grenades and directing automatic weapons fire at staff and diners in ground-floor lobbies and restaurants, the attackers at each hotel ascended the atriums. This allowed them to hunt down guests while dropping grenades and shooting at commandos below.

The Oberoi Group employs many plainclothes security officers in its hotels, but they are unarmed, Mr. Oberoi said.

J. K. Dutt, the director general of India’s National Security Guards, the commando force that took the lead in the fighting, said Sunday in a televised news conference that the most difficult gunman to attack in the Taj hotel was one who ascended a spiral staircase and took up a position behind an extremely thick pillar that was part of the 105-year-old building’s original structure.

Particularly at the Taj, the attackers seemed to have detailed knowledge of the building’s layout, Mr. Dutt said. They kept moving among large halls with multiple entrances, not allowing themselves to be cornered in small rooms without other exits. By contrast, the commandos and the police had old blueprints of the massive, labyrinthine hotel that did not clearly show which passageways were connected and which were blocked by walls, and did not show recent construction, Mr. Dutt said.

The police and first-response agencies should be working with the hotel industry to devise crisis action plans that would include computer programs detailing all internal and external aspects of hotel building structure, said Michael Coldrick, a London-based security professional and a former explosives specialist with Scotland Yard. For example, a prerecorded DVD walk-through of a hotel could be used to brief special forces assault teams to make sure that they know what to expect.

Hotels may also ask staff to keep a closer eye on customers. At some point, Mr. Coldrick said, “We might see cleaning ladies with explosives detectors.”

In the end, several security experts say, no system is foolproof.

The Marriott in Islamabad, which had been struck in the past, had layers of security in place on the night the truck bomber approached. The truck was stopped by security guards who check vehicles before allowing them through a hydraulic barrier.

Those precautions are credited with saving lives; the truck never made it past the barrier and closer to the hotel, where the blast would have been more devastating. Still, more than 50 people died and more than 250 were wounded.


FROM I-BBC:
Video report:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7752824.stm
 Pictures:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7751360.stm


Timeline Emerges Amid Security Changes in India
NYTIMES
By Sharon Otterman
November 30, 2008, 12:20 pm

Facing criticism over the government’s handling of the Mumbai attacks, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Sunday that the country would strengthen and streamline its anti-terrorist forces.

One key change will be to double the size of the 7,400-member National Security Guard — the elite, black-suited army commandos who launched themselves from helicopters onto rooftops during the attacks and went floor by floor in the Trident-Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels to flush out the terrorists. The new commandos will be based in four cities around the country, not just in Delhi, which is now their sole base.

The Times’s Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar have reported on Sunday that it took the commandos about 10 hours to begin their Mumbai operation. If the response had been quicker, said J. N. Rai, former intelligence officer and adviser to the home ministry, they could have “saved many more lives.”

Why did it take so long? A slow plane, sleeping commandos and lags in communication between top ministers, the Times of India reports.

According to the newspaper’s account, this is how the response played out in real time:

9:30 p.m. Wednesday: The terrorists strike Mumbai. Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh is in Kerala. He is briefed about the attack. By the time he grasps the enormity of the situation, 90 minutes have gone by.

11 p.m.: Mr. Deshmukh calls Home Minister Shivraj Patil - who has now resigned from his post - and asks for NSG commandos. “How many men?” Patil asks. “200,” Mr. Deshmukh says. Mr. Patil calls NSG chief J.K. Dutt and tells him to send 200 battle-ready commandos to Mumbai.

11 p.m. to 2 a.m. Thursday: Most of the NSG men have to be roused from sleep. They don their uniforms, strap on safety gear and collect ammo and firearms. It is discovered that the plane that can take 200 men, the IL 76, is not in Delhi but Chandigarh. Someone wakes up the IL 76 pilot, the plane refueled. It finally arrives in Delhi.

5 a.m. The commandos land at Mumbai airport. By the time they board the waiting buses, it is 5:25 a.m.

6 a.m. The buses reach the designated place in south Mumbai where the commandos are briefed, divided into different groups and sent out on their mission.

7 a.m. They start their operation about nine-and-a-half hours after the terror strike.

“When Indian cities are vulnerable to terror attacks,” the article concluded by asking, “why is there no commando force like the NSG, or its units, in every city?”
Bush Sends Rice to India in Aftermath of Attacks
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:23 p.m. ET
November 30, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President George W. Bush on Sunday dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi in support of India following the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 200 people, including six Americans.

Rice and Bush wanted an opportunity ''to express the condolences of the American government directly to the Indian government and the Indian people,'' Rice spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Rice was scheduled to leave Sunday night for a meeting in London and then travel to Brussels for a NATO gathering. On Wednesday, following the NATO meeting, she will travel to New Delhi, according to her new itinerary.

''Secretary Rice's visit to India is a further demonstration of the United States' commitment to stand in solidarity with the people of India as we all work together to hold these extremists accountable,'' White House press secretary Dana Perino said in a statement.

Rice had planned to attend the meeting of NATO foreign ministers Tuesday and Wednesday, with talks focusing on a broad international agenda, including Afghanistan, Georgia and the Ukraine. From there she was to visit Rome, Helsinki and Copenhagen, but it was unclear whether the trip to India would cancel or only postpone those visits.

Rice spoke with President-elect Barack Obama about India earlier on Sunday, McCormack said. It was the third phone conversation between the two since the attacks. Rice has also been in daily phone contact with Indian and Pakistani officials.

The announcement of Rice's trip came hours after Bush assured India's leader that the U.S. government will put its full weight behind the investigation into the attacks in Mumbai.

Earlier Sunday, a Republican senator endorsed a campaign suggestion from President-elect Barack Obama -- appointment of a special envoy, perhaps former President Bill Clinton, to the disputed region of Kashmir -- as the U.S. seeks to ease tensions between India and its nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan.

The lone gunman captured by police after the attacks told authorities he belonged to a Pakistani militant group with links to Kashmir, a senior Indian police officer said. India has blamed ''elements'' from Pakistan for the 60-hour siege during which suspected Muslim militants hit 10 sites across India's financial capital, leaving at least 174 dead.

Bush told India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in a telephone call that ''out of this tragedy can come an opportunity to hold these extremists accountable and demonstrate the world's shared commitment to combat terrorism,'' White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in a statement.

In addition to the Americans killed in the coordinated shooting rampage in India's financial capital, the foreigners among the dead included Germans, Canadians, Israelis and nationals from Britain, Italy, Japan, China, Thailand, Australia and Singapore.

Bush told the prime minister that ''he has directed the state and defense departments along with other federal agencies to devote the necessary resources and personnel to this situation,'' Johndroe said.

Despite India's claim, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said: ''I don't think that this is the time for India or anybody in India to accuse Pakistan. It's time to work with Pakistan. Pakistan is now a democracy. India is a democracy. And as two democracies, we need to strengthen each other, rather than fall into the trap of the terrorists, who want us to fight with each other so that they can get greater strength.''

India repeatedly has accused Pakistan of complicity in terrorist attacks on its soil, many of which it traces to militant groups fighting Indian rule in the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir. The U.S. has tried to persuade Pakistan to shift its security focus from India, with which it has fought three wars, to Islamic militants along the Afghan border.

Obama told Time magazine in an interview in October that ''Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation ... that is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically.'' He spoke of devoting ''serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there to figure out a plausible approach.'' When asked if that sounded like a job for Clinton, Obama replied, ''Might not be bad'' and that they had spoken about the issue when they had lunch in September in Clinton's New York office.

The suggestion of sending an envoy won support from a leading Republican senator.

''I would think that might be a good idea because, it appears to me, that we have an interlocking situation of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India,'' said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Asked specifically about Clinton as a possible mediator, Lugar said: ''I think he could do a great job there.''

Lugar and Haqqani appeared on ABC's ''This Week.''






A worker, left, is seen through a broken window as another looks out at Leopold Cafe
Investigators are piecing together how the attacks unfolded

i-BBC 30 November 2008
How Mumbai attacks unfolded

New details have been slowly emerging about the early stages of the Mumbai terror attacks. Much of the information has been gleaned after the capture of one of the militants involved, as the BBC's Prachi Pinglay reports from Mumbai.

The story of the Mumbai terror attacks likely began when a private fishing trawler with five crew members set sail from the Arabian sea off the coast of Porbandar in India's western Gujarat state on 13 November.

Sometime during the next 12 days, the trawler was taken over at sea by at least 10 young men, aged between 20 and 23 years, carrying backpacks and bags, according to sources in the Mumbai police, coastguard, and commandos.

Investigators still do not know what the men were sailing on and where they were coming from when they took over the trawler - though suspicion has fallen on the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

What they do know is that the men tied up one of the crew in the trawler's engine room, and slit his throat. The abandoned trawler was found by Indian coastguard ships more than three nautical miles off Mumbai.

GPS co-ordinates

When coastguards boarded the vessel, they found the dead crew member, plus a satellite phone and GPS tracker that possibly belonged to the trawler's crew.

Investigators say that Kasar has told them that their work was to 'take hostages for safe passage'

Investigators told the BBC that the tracker showed "a return mapping for Karachi", leading to speculation that the men who attacked Mumbai had planned to return in the same trawler.

A ferry doing about 20 knots can cover the 506-nautical mile distance between Karachi and Mumbai in a little over 24 hours.

After abandoning the trawler, the men opened the inflatable dinghies they were carrying and sailed into Mumbai waters early on 26 November, a little more than 10 hours before the attack, investigators say.

An abandoned dinghy has been re