26/11 anniversary: When LeT taught Kasab how to fish

Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) gave ‘sea training’ to 26/11 terror attack convict Ajmal Kasab in the high seas of ‘Karachi’, revealed a new book ‘Fragile Frontiers: The Secret History of Mumbai Terror Attacks’. The sea training, as per the book written by historian Saroj Kumar Rath, also included ‘how to fish’ something that made Kasab think that ‘he had got a job and he could earn a respectable living’. “He (Kasab) was not informed by the LeT why he was being prepared as a mariner and as a fisherman,” quoted the book from what Kasab told during his interrogation.

According to the book, fearing a leak, the sea route assault plan was kept secret by the top LeT commanders - Hafiz Saeed, Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, Abu Hamza and others - until November 2008. It also said that before the D-day, the LeT tried to send attackers to Mumbai twice, but ‘failed on both occasions’. “In September 2008, the boat carrying terrorists hit a rock in the sea and the attackers almost drowned before their handlers rescued them.

The other failed attempt was on 7 November 2008, when an alarmed captain of an Indian boat refused to surrender to the LeT and fled,” it added. The book, in one of its essays titled ‘Ajmal Kasab: The LeT side of the story’, recorded that the 2-year training of the recruits for the 26/11 attacks was a ‘joint responsibility of the LeT and the ISI’.

As part of the sea training the recruits were taught how to read maps, how to measure the depth of the sea, how to use GPS for the sea route, how to use the nets of fishermen and how to operate a ship. Skills like how to open and close Kalashnikovs, firing of a gun... and how to survive 60 hours without food and still climb a mountain with a heavy load were taught. Kasab, the lone terrorist captured alive after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, was hanged at Yerawada jail in Pune on November 21, 2012 after the then-president Pranab Mukherjee rejected his mercy petition.

By Manik Gupta