Attribution of The 2008 Mumbai Attacks - Attackers

Attackers

The names and photographs of the ten attackers and their hometowns in Pakistan were released by Mumbai police on 9 December. All were from Punjab except Ismail Khan, who was from Dera Ismail Khan in the North-West Frontier Province.

Their names were difficult to establish because the alleged trainers of the attackers maintained "a system of changing the names of the members every few months, so that everyone had layers of names that were discarded over time."

Some of the terrorists booked a room in the Taj hotel posed as students using forged Mauritian identity documents and credit cards, but there is no evidence any of them were actually from Mauritius, which is an Indian Ocean island nation.

Each attacker carried a dozen hand grenades, a 9 mm handgun with two 18-round clips and an AK-47, seven to nine 30-round magazines and more than 100 rounds of loose ammunition. Each terrorist also carried a 17.6-pound (8 kg) bomb. Three of these bombs were recovered and defused, while the others exploded during the attacks. To navigate to Mumbai by sea and to find some targets, the terrorists used Global Positioning System handsets.

On 2 December, the number of ten terrorists, all coming into Mumbai from Karachi via a hijacked trawler, was repeated by Mumbai Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor. He detailed that the terrorists broke up into five groups of two men each.

One attacker, Mohammad Ajmal Amir, is known to be a Pakistani national. The Pakistani government denies it, but several reporters have visited the small town in Pakistan where he said his family lives, and verified it. In addition, Mohammed Ajmal Amir was able to identify his home town on Google Maps, and pointed out places he used to hang out as a teenager.

The Observer stated that it had found Ajmal Amir's parents in the electoral record for "Faridkot, near Depalpur" containing 478 registered voters, and described comments from villagers about Ajmal Amir and about the village being "an active recruiting ground" for Lashkar-e-Taiba. The BBC also reported confirmation from local villagers and the presence of numerous intelligence officials at Ajmal Amir's family's house.

The Indian government supplied a dossier to Pakistan's high commission in Delhi, containing interrogations, weapons, and call records of conversations during the attacks. Shown to friendly governments and media, it provides a detailed sequence of training, supplying, and constant communications with handlers from Pakistan. The Pakistan government dismissed the dossier as "not evidence," but also announced that it had detained over a hundred members of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a charity linked with Lashkar-e-Taiba.

On 12 February 2009, Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik has agreed that some part of the conspiracy did take place in Pakistan. Malik said that Pakistan has lodged the FIR under Anti-Terrorism Act against three persons.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on 15 February 2009 that the 2007 Samjhauta Express bombings and the Mumbai attacks were linked, and that Pakistan needed information from India to continue its investigation.

To answer 30 question that Pakistan had given to India on the attack, India provided a 400 page dossier which they claim will be adequate enough to answer all the questions.

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