I’ve been trying to keep up, but Clint knows the subcontinental jihad much better than I do. I asked for his thoughts on the latest and he was kind enough to oblige. Read on.
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The Mumbai Mirror reports that seven suspects have been identified in connection with the 7/11 Mumbai train bombings. All of the suspects are either Bangladeshi or spent time there recently, allegedly at training camps run by Pakistan’s ISI. Mastermind is aka Zabiuddin Ansari, aka Sayyad Zabiuddin, aka “Zaby”, thought to be back in Bangladesh now. (This report from June also connects him with the Kashmir-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.)
I would regard that pronouncement as a little more solid than the Goa Herald article which Allah linked below, alleging Dawood Ibrahim met with Osama bin Laden on the India-Pakistan border to plan the operation … although the Al-Qaeda link and cheerleading certainly aren’t implausible.
Bear in mind that India is still capturing and trying suspects from the 1993 Mumbai bombing, and still piecing some parts of that conspiracy together. That was a surprisingly vast operation that was put together in Pakistan, Dubai, and India. I expect the logistics behind this will be equally complicated and yield new clues and speculation for months to come.
As for my own Great White Whale here — oh, he’s still very much a candidate indeed. Perhaps even more so: The Times of India reports that Dawood Ibrahim met with Bangladeshi politicians in Dubai this spring about smuggling weapons into Bangladesh and arming terrorist groups there.
As for the forensic findings that RDX was not used in these blasts — there have been large seizures of RDX from Bangladeshi terrorists in India recently. RDX is hard to come by; in 1993 it had to be smuggled in from Pakistan by Ibrahim’s syndicate, D-Company. Perhaps these Bangladeshi terrorists had arranged to use RDX, but when it was confiscated they had to improvise and use dynamite or a little home-made Mother of Satan instead.
Did you see those headlines about how rioting Mumbaikars have killed hundreds of Muslims in retaliation for the blasts? No, I didn’t either. Things are always tense and dicey in India, and the politics can be quite violent — but Mumbai has gotten back to normal with amazing speed and efficiency. It may be the rudest city in the world, but it is certainly the most resilient.
Update: A conspiracy worthy of Josh Marshall: now the Taliban’s supposedly involved and RDX has supposedly been recovered at the scene.
Fourteen persons, including a woman, planted the bombs that ripped through seven local train carriages on Tuesday, police investigations so far have established.
It is still not clear of what material the bombs were made, but a black briefcase containing RDX, an electronic timer, and other explosives has been recovered from the blast site at Khar…
Two days before the blasts, security agencies held a member of the Taliban at Delhi airport, reinforcing suspicion of a Qaeda link to terrorist groups operating in India.
