By IANS,
Mumbai : On the night of Nov 26, 2008, 10 heavily armed Pakistani terrorists sneaked into India’s financial capital to hold its 17 million population to ransom for 60 hours. By the end of the terror siege, on the afternoon of Nov 29, 166 people were dead and hundreds injured.
The 10 terrorists came into Mumbai from the Arabian Sea in hijacked fishing vessels and landed in the fishing village at Colaba, opposite the central government housing complex of Badhwar Park.
From there, they unobstrusively caught cabs in groups of two and embarked on their sinister mission to various locations in south Mumbai, in a radius of barely four kilometres.
Investigators probing the terror strike pieced together the events in the days that followed.
According to them, Abdul Rehman, Abu Ali and Abu Soheb went to the Taj Mahal Palace hotel; Abdul Rehman Chota and Fahad Ullah headed to the Trident-Oberoi Hotel.
Nasir Abu Umar and Babar Imran alias Abu Aksha targeted Nariman House; Isamal Khan, Abu Ismail and Ajmal Amir Kasab unleashed terror on the busy Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST).
All the terrorists, except Kasab, were killed. Kasab, who was then 22, was caught on camera striding through CST with a gun across his shoulders. He was caught alive by a police team at Chowpatty, around 3 a.m. on Nov 27. His accomplice Abu Ismail was shot dead there.
The nine bodies were kept embalmed in the morgue of the Sir J.J. Hospital in south Mumbai under tight security for over 15 months before they were disposed of in January 2010.
In April 2010, Home Minister R.R. Patil made the stunning announcement in the Maharashtra Legislature that the nine bodies had been disposed off at a secret location.
He said the state government had sought the centre’s permission as several international issues and agencies were involved in the 26/11 case investigations.
Patil’s assertion came in the wake of opposition by major Muslim organisations that they would not permit the burial of the nine terrorists as “they were not true followers of Islam”.