Mumbai Attacks – the truth behind the lie

• False flag operation?

As the Pakistani audience is focused on the political circus at home and the armed forces quietly launched new offensive to deal with remnants of terrorism in Balochistan, a new book has stirred a storm in India, reigniting a debate whether or not the Mumbai attack, also known as 26/11, was a false flag operation carried out by agents of Indian intelligence covertly backed by actors in Israel and the US.

The book ‘The Betrayal of India: Revisiting the 26/11 Evidence’, is authored by celebrated investigator Elias Davidsson, who also inked another meticulous book, Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11.

Davidsson’s book has identified many holes in the Indian story portraying Mumbai attacks as India’s 9/11. In his conclusion, Davidsson says it is highly plausible that ‘major institutional actors in India, the United States and possibly Israel, were complicit in conceiving, planning, directing and executing the attacks of 26/11; but the evidence of a deceptive investigation is even stronger’.

“The first definite conclusion of this book is that India’s major institutions, including the central government, parliament, bureaucracy, armed forces, Mumbai police, intelligence services, judiciary and media, have deliberately suppressed the truth regarding 26/11 and continue to do so. I could discover no hint of a desire among the aforementioned parties to establish the truth on these deadly events.”

The suspect, after being convicted and sentenced to death, was presumably executed, but the hanging was done secretly in jail and his body, like the bodies of the other dead ‘terrorists’, was buried in a secret place

Despite the fact that both Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba denied responsibility for the attacks and, Davidsson argues, they did so for a good reason, it was also interesting to note how Indian establishment managed to get a bonanza of funds and equipment for the Mumbai police. By framing 26/11 as an act of war, India also got an immediate 21pc hike in military spending with promises of increases in subsequent years.

The following arguments may help us in evaluating the events which prove a cover-up. In the Mumbai attack case, the then Indian prime minister implied, while the attack was still in progress, that the perpetrators were from a terrorist group supported by, or at least tolerated by, Pakistan.

When officials claim to know the identity of a perpetrator (individual or group) prior to any serious investigation, this suggests that a false narrative is being initiated and that strenuous efforts will soon be made to implant it in the minds of the people.

More importantly, soon after the attacks, Henry Kissinger attempted to implicate Pakistan. Three days prior to the attack on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, one of the main attack sites, Kissinger had been staying in the hotel.

Kissinger “sat with top executives from Goldman Sachs and India’s Tata group in the Taj to ‘chat about American politics’”. Kissinger’s presence on the scene with the Indian elite (the Tata family is one of India’s wealthiest, and the Tata Group owns the Taj) would be peculiar enough to cause raising of the eyebrows, but when combined with his immediate finger-pointing to Pakistan, it becomes extremely suspect. As Davidsson shows, the case against Pakistan remains full of contradictions, unsupported allegations, and absurdities.

More importantly, neither the police nor the judge charged with trying the sole surviving suspect, Ajmal Kasab, made public a timeline of events. Even the most basic facts of when a given set of attacks began and when they ended were left vague.

Key witnesses were not called to testify. Witnesses who said they saw the terrorists commit violence, or spoke to them, or were in the same room with them, were ignored by the court.

Contradictions and miracles were not sorted out. One victim was apparently resurrected from the dead when his testimony was essential to blaming Pakistan. A second victim died in two different places, while a third died in three places. No one in authority cared enough to solve these difficulties.

Eyewitnesses to the crime differed on the clothing and skin colour of the terrorists, and on how many of them there were. No resolution was sought.

At least one eyewitness confessed she found it hard to distinguish “friends” from terrorists. No probe was stimulated by this odd confusion. The number of terrorists who committed the deed changed repeatedly, as did the number of terrorists who survived.

Crime scenes were violated, with bodies hauled off before they could be examined. Identity parades were rendered invalid by weeks of prior exposure of the witnesses to pictures of the suspect in newspapers.

Claims that the terrorists were armed with AK-47s were common, yet forensic study of the attack at the Cama Hospital failed to turn up a single AK-47 bullet.

Of the “hundreds of witnesses processed by the court” in relation to the attacks at the Café Leopold, Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Oberoi-Trident Hotel or Nariman House, “not a single one testified to having observed any of the eight accused kill anyone”. Indian authorities declined to order autopsies on the dead at the targeted Jewish center in Nariman House. The dead, five out of six of whom were Israeli citizens, were instead whisked back to Israel by a Jewish organisation based in Israel, allegedly for religious reasons. Religious sensitivity seems to have extended to a large safe at the crime scene, which the team also transported to Israel.

The surviving alleged terrorist had no public trial. No transcript of his secret trial has been released. One lawyer who agreed to defend the accused was removed by the court and another was assassinated.

The public was told there was extensive CCTV footage of the attacks, despite the mysterious malfunctioning of the majority of CCTV cameras on the days in question; but only a very small percentage of the claimed footage was ever released and it suffers from serious defects – two conflicting time-stamps and signs of editing.

Members of an elite Indian commando unit that showed up with between 475 and 800 members to battle eight terrorists were not allowed to testify in court. The ‘confession’ of the suspect, on which the judge leaned heavily, was given in secret. No transcript of this confession has been released to the public and the suspect later renounced the confession, saying he had been under threat from police when he gave it.

The suspect, after being convicted and sentenced to death, was presumably executed, but the hanging was done secretly in jail and his body, like the bodies of the other dead ‘terrorists’, was buried in a secret place.

It is difficult to see how the investigation described above differs from what we would expect to see in a police state. Evidently, the ‘world’s largest democracy’ is in trouble.

Meanwhile, motives for the ‘highly plausible’ false flag attack, Davidsson notes, are not difficult to find. The attacks not only filled the coffers of national security agencies, creating as they did the impression of a permanent threat to India, but also helped tilt India toward countries claiming to take the lead in the war on terror. The FBI showed great interest in the attacks from the outset. It actually had a man on the scene during the attacks and sent an entire team directly after the event. The Bureau was, remarkably, given direct access to the arrested suspect and to his recorded confession (before he even had a lawyer), as well as to eyewitnesses.

The book hence has rebuffed the entire Indian cooked up story on Mumbai attacks, providing a new impetus to the claims that it was a false flag operation conducted by Indian intelligence agencies in cahoots with US and Israeli collaborators. It is no secret how David Headley, a US citizen, had put entire blame on Pakistan.

Hence, the book has cleared Pakistan of all the allegations of committing terrorism in India and gives a new insight for the international community to look into the matter and bring the real perpetrators of the crime to justice.