India: Terrorist attacks: Bombay is Mumbai is Islamofascist terrorist target
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Tuesday, July 11, I began gathering news URLs about Mumbai, India (aka known by its colonial name, Bombay), the massacre there designed with engineering expertise that reminds one of how Hitler was praised for making the trains run on time. But trains have been occasions for massacre before in India--and those train-massacres resonated with the communal strife between India's Muslims and Hindus as well. An early report from BBC told us this:
More than 160 people have been killed and 460 injured by seven bombs on the train network in the Indian financial capital Mumbai (Bombay), police say.
The first of the near-simultaneous blasts went off at about 1830 local time (1300 GMT), during the rush hour in the suburbs on the Western Railway.
Correspondents spoke of scenes of pandemonium, with people jumping from trains and bodies flung onto tracks.
There have been a number of bomb attacks in Mumbai in recent years.
Most of the exploding bombs were on moving trains; two were detonated at train stations. See the BBC map.
An even earlier reports was from a BBC blog where Rabiya Prakesh mentions how internet locations had immediately gone into service.
Mumbai Help is keeping across the developing situation, and on tonight's programme we will try and bring you the latest.On the matter of bloggers's speedy response, see blogger Steve's judgement of excellence on Obiter Dicta.
If you are in Mumbai or have been affected by the blasts, please do get in touch with us. We want to try and piece together what has happened and what the situation is like on the ground.
We've already been getting some emails in telling us that the transport system has been paralysed, and the telephone networks are down.
The day after the attacks some of the nitty gritty details in all their gritty began to emerge. CNN reported that h+ly sophisticated timers for at least some of the bombs in Bombay, were hidden in ...
Timers hidden in pencils have been discovered in at least three of the seven sites where bombs exploded on commuter trains in India's financial capital, killing 185 people, according to CNN's sister station, CNN-IBN.I decided to keep my own eyes open to mention of the timers in further reports.
The timers are believed to have detonated bombs made of RDX, one of the most powerful kinds of military explosives, the network quoted police as saying Wednesday.
However, CNN could not independently confirm the discovery of the timers or the material used in the explosives.
No group has claimed responsibility for the blasts, which came in a span of 11 minutes during Tuesday evening's rush hour in Mumbai, when trains were jam-packed with commuters making their way home.Pakistan's govt was already on Jul 12,2k6 trying to fix blame on the Kashmir dispute between the countries which dispute has attracted terrorist activism for decades.
The Western Railway system carries more than 4.5 million passengers a day in the city formerly named Bombay.
Maharashtra state's police chief said more than 700 people were hurt, and hospitals continued appeals for blood donors.
Not all judgments of the blogsphere's attention were positive. Already on Jul 12, Bombay's Sepia Mutiny scored not only America's mainstream media for being "poor in local coverage" of the murderous carnage, but also knocked the "relative silence from the blogosphere." The post by Ennis has some very serious geostrategic thinking, and refWrite recommends reading it. A sample where he refers us to Hukku, on another Sepia Mutiny page from the day before and now with scads of comments): I couldn't track what Ennis quotes, either on the earlier blog-entry nor on the Foreign Affairs page where :
“Accordingly, the Pakistani government continues to support the insurgents, although more subtly than before. But what the Musharraf regime and its more intransigent Islamist allies fail to recognize is that Indian patience with Pakistani-sponsored violence in Kashmir and elsewhere in India is nearly at an end. Although largely ignored by the U.S. media, bombings during the festival for the Hindu holiday of Diwali in New Delhi last November, in which Pakistani-based groups were implicated, almost precipitated another major crisis, which was averted only by the Indian leadership’s restraint. But it is far from clear whether such forbearance could survive another attack. Furthermore, in contrast to the 2001-2 crisis, when the Indian military lacked viable plans for responding to a Pakistani-based terrorist attack, the Indian army is now well prepared to undertake swift and decisive action by retaliating against targets in Pakistan at times and places of its own choosing. Unfortunately, the Pakistani leadership appears to be oblivious to India’s growing frustration. Consequently, although another Indo-Pakistani war is not likely, it remains possible…”A preview of the first 500 of 3,474 words total gives a summary background for the Kindia-Pakistan conflict over Kashimir, but the key quote by author Sumit Ganguly is not in the 500.
Another analyst, writing in OpenDemocracy,Ajai Sahni puts the blame squarely on Pakistan:
The latest series of blasts is, in essence, a continuation of a sustained covert war against India in which Pakistan has created and exploited a number of Islamist terrorist groups over more than a decade and a half. The principal focus of this war remains at present the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K); but since the early 1990s there have been sustained efforts to extend this war to every part of India, and there has been a cyclical succession of terrorist operations across the length and breadth of the country.Sahni argues that one or more of a shortlist of known organizations, in league with the Pakistan secret service and working according to its plan, are at the root of the terrorism this week in Mumbai. They are: Lakshar-e-Taiba / Pure Army of God (LeT); Studients Islamic Society of India (Simi); and "the Dawood Ibrahim gant" now based in Karachi -
The frequency, spread and, in some cases, intensity of these operations has seen some escalation in the past years, as international pressure on Pakistan to end terrorism in J&K has diminished levels of "deniable" engagement in that theatre after a diminution of the international "tolerance of terror" after 9/11.
It is significant that hundreds of Pakistan-backed terrorist cells have been discovered, disrupted and neutralised over the past years. The cumulative evidence of these operations has systematically confirmed a sustained and comprehensive Pakistani strategy of subversion and mobilisation for terrorism in virtually every significant concentration of Muslim people in India. This strategy has failed entirely to secure a mass base among India's Muslims, but a handful of recruits – sufficient to sustain a sporadic and, given contemporary technologies, fairly devastating, terrorist campaign – has been available.
"This has been involved in trafficking in arms and explosives, as well as the illegal transfer of funds to south Asian and international Islamist terrorist groups. The "D Company", as the gang is known, still has a stranglehold over organised crime in Bombay, and its infrastructure is regularly used by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to facilitate terrorist activities in India as well as abroad. The Dawood gang is on India's list of wanted terrorist organisations, as well as on the United States list of proscribed terrorist groups.Mr Sahni may be altogether wrong regarding any and all of these three organizations, but his considered analysis is well worth your reading.
Another blogger of India-origin working n the USA gives us his take on the US media attention to the Mumbai story. On his blog Context Switch, Sibin Mohan tells us:
I would like to take an alternate spin on the media coverage in this post actually...I was incredulous about the response to the event by the American mainstream media ! They passed it off as a footnote at best, and then got on with more "serious" matters ! As I mentioned, the Washington Post probably had the initial uptake on the matter and a couple of editorials and op-eds. Similar coverage was seen in the New York Times. While I have great respect for the journalistic integrity of these two large institutions in world media, I was more than disappointed ! CNN, seemed to have better coverage and analysis on this situation ! So did Pajamas Media, Wikinews and Slate ! BBC, of course, has a pretty good handle on this situation (as expected from a respeced International news organization). So, why this blind spot from the two of America's (and probably the world's) largest news publications ? Even the Los Angeles Times had just one story on this...are American newspapers editors and readers just not interested in a bombing in internationl cities ?Let's digress (well, not really...) by reading a blog-entry, "Floods, Riots, and Bombs," by Avi who attends a friends wedding in Mumbai the day before, and visits his parents, but normally he lives these days in Indonesia. He has a heart for the city, and he was there on that day.
Hang on a sec...the bombings in London and Madrid got a lot more coverage that this incident! I remember constant news reports and updates and stories and editorials being written about those "heinous" crimes ! Journalists were crying in unison about the rise of the islamic terrorists and how they should be countered...but in the case of Mumbai, not so much as a peep !
The Times of India follows the line of thawt offered by India's intelligence––the train terrorism of Jul 11,2k6 was the work of LeT and Simi. While this line is as yet entirely hypothetical (and may be the best "theory" available even now), the line has been picked up in the USA by Robert Spence, the know-it-all o jihad, writing for Human Events.
But the most poignant item I've seen so far is the article you'll get when you click on the title of this blog-entry. Give it a try.
-- Politicarp
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