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HBO film details Mumbai attack
What sets “Terror in Mumbai” apart from just about every documentary made about a terrorist attack is the running conversation between the gunmen and their leaders.
The film, which debuts tonight at 8 on HBO, details the Nov. 26-28, 2008, assault by 10 young men who kept India’s largest city frozen with fear for three days. The young Pakistanis, members of the group Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), killed 170 people and wounded more than 300 as they targeted nightclubs, hotels, a bus station and a Jewish center.
Some months before, Indian intelligence had fed Lashkar about a dozen cell phones, some of which were used by the Mumbai gunmen. When the attacks began, police were able to isolate the phones’ transmissions and listened to their chilling conversations. Closed-circuit televisions in the Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels captured live footage of the terrorists as they roamed the halls, shooting at bystanders.
Also used in the film, directed by Dan Reed and narrated by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, is live footage of the sole terrorist who was captured, as he answers an interrogator’s questions from his hospital bed.
The 10 young men, gullible and unworldly, were recruited from impoverished and remote Pakistani villages. At least one was sold to the masterminds by his father. As the footage and phone conversations show, they were in awe of the Mumbai hotels’ opulence and stopped to marvel at 30-inch computer screens in a shop. The captured terrorist said his controllers promised him a reward in the afterlife. At one point during the assaults, a terror boss is heard telling a gunman, “You are very close to heaven.”
Lashkar, which is only loosely connected to al-Qaida, was formed to “liberate” Muslims living in Indian-occupied Kashmir, but has since espoused a global-jihad philosophy.
As the world’s media focused on the situation, a gleeful controller is heard telling his gunmen by phone, “With God’s blessing, you have done a brilliant job!”
The Mumbai police were badly unprepared for the assault and took days to mount any kind of reaction. One police commissioner tells the filmmakers that it seemed the whole city was under attack.
As the final hours neared, only two terrorists were left. Tired and weak, they holed up with hostages in a hotel room. An increasingly impatient controller is heard urging them to fight on, throw hand grenades and keep on killing. He tells them the attacks must end with your deaths.
He also tells them to “sit [the hostages] up and shoot them in the back of the head.”
About a half-hour later, with the deed still not done, one gunman explains the delay to his controller, saying, “Please don’t be angry.” He then can be heard mowing down the hostages.