Still At Sea

From Outlook India:

Cops_mumbai_20081127 If anyone needed a lesson on how to conduct special operations from the sea, they could take a leaf out of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai late on Wednesday, November 26, night. With two magazines taped together, strapped to their AK-47s, the men who arrived on speed boats from the sea could have easily been mistaken for naval commandos carrying out exercises off the coast. But they weren't, and as a security expert told Outlook, “this is a quantum jump in terrorism in India. Global terror has finally come home.”

In many was, this was India's 9/11, an attack on mainland India on a scale it has never witnessed. For a nation that has dealt with armed insurgency and terrorism soon after independence, this was still an unprecedented scale of attack. It was just not prepared for anything even remotely like it. “It is one thing to plant bombs and melt into the crowd. It is another to come in from the sea and launch an attack such as this,” a senior intelligence official told Outlook.

So far what is known is that the email sent by the terrorists, claiming a group called the 'Deccan Mujahideen' carried out the attack, has been traced back to Russia. Senior security officials say that it was, in all likelihood, sent by a Lashkar-e-Toiba operative and this is perhaps the strongest indication of the real face behind the attack. Intelligence sources also point out that the current group of terrorists could have also got help from the Mumbai underworld as well as Chechen elements within the Russian Mafia which has already found a foothold in India.

More here.