Mumbai attack on tourists, Chabad house, hatched in Pakistan, ex-investigator says
Attacks targeted four guests at Nariman Chabad house along with its rabbi and his pregnant wife; hotels and tourist spots also targeted.
By GIDEON GORENUpdated: AUGUST 18, 2015 05:23Pigeons fly near the burning Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai November 27, 2008.(photo credit: REUTERS)
In what appears to be a stunning admission, a senior figure from Pakistan's security establishment has charged his country with responsibility for facilitating the 2008 Mumbai attack, in which 164 people, including six Jewish and Israeli victims, were killed in a coordinated shooting by ten Islamic terrorists.The attack on the Nariman Chabad house, which was targeted along with luxury hotels, a train station, a popular cafe and other sites, claimed the life the four guests, as well as the house's spiritual leader Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, and his wife, Rivka, who was five months pregnant.The couple's son, Moshe, was saved by the family's Indian nanny, who took the child and fled the building.Writing for Pakistan's Dawn News, the former Director General for Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency, Tariq Khosa, wrote that "Pakistan has to deal with the Mumbai mayhem, planned and launched from its soil."Khosa, who indicts the "the entire state security apparatus", cites stalling tactics by the defendants frequent changes of trial judges, and the assassination of the case prosecutor as well as retracting from original testimony by some key witnesses, as central features of Pakistan's dubious treatment of the sixty-six hour attack, adding that "cognizance was taken by the Islamabad High Court which directed the trial to be concluded within two months."Islamabad's former top-investigator went on to build the case against his country. He notes that the only surviving member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist cell in question, Ajmal Kasab, was a Pakistani national and that investigators matched explosive casings used during the attack in Mumbai to a Pakistani site in the Sindh province established as the cell's training ground. An Indian vessel that was hijacked, brought back to training ground, repainted and used to deliver the assailants to Mumbai was also linked the the cell, as was the engine of a rubber boat abandoned by the terrorists when they beached near the port of Mumbai.