CSI Mumbai: How the Americans helped crack the Lashkar code



Four days after the terror assault on Mumbai ended, an unmarked C-130 Hercules landed at Santa Cruz airport. Its cargo: a combined FBI and CIA team of a dozen forensic experts from the United States.

A half-dozen Indian and US sources helped piece together how the US and India joined forces to carry out the ultimate crime scene investigation.

The US experts had been dispatched by their president George W Bush after a request for technical assistance by India on the second day of the attack. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh avoided asking for direct US intervention, but Indian experts were aware they lacked the ability to secure a trail of evidence which they knew would go back to Pakistan.


Also, using a US forensic team would automatically make the case to Washington of Islamabad’s complicity.

Not everyone on the Indian side was pleased. The then Mumbai police chief, Hassan Gafoor, complained about turning to the US for assistance. Gafoor, criticised by the Pradhan committee for his passivity during the 26/11 attack, was slapped down by New Delhi.

The US team moved into the Four Seasons Hotel, taking up an entire floor. As they set up a secure satellite communications link back to the US, an Intelligence Bureau counterterrorism official flew down from Delhi to coordinate with them.

AN Roy, director general of Mumbai police at the time, met them the first day. “They had a long list of requests: sites to go to, information on US nationals who had been victims, and so on.” A Mumbai police officer was deputed to help them.

The US team collected information from all the places attacked by the five Lashkar-e-Taiba teams. They collected the serial numbers from the AK-47s and grenades used by the assailants as well as the DNA samples of all the terrorists and the US victims. “They also took samples from Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving Lashkar attacker," says Deven Bharti, then additional commissioner of the Mumbai crime branch.

The US team stayed over 10 days before returning home. They used their communications link to confer with their bomb data centre in Virginia. An Indian official remembers that the CIA personnel had come from the San Francisco office.

The FBI began to produce results quickly. They determined that the terrorists had used Arges grenades, a defunct Austrian brand – whose only remaining factory was in Pakistan.

The US tracked down the VoIP that the terrorists had used to talk to their handlers in Pakistan to a service provider based in New Jersey. The US also tracked the payments, sent via MoneyGram and Western Union, to Peshawar and Italy. The Italian payment, as the chargesheet later noted, was made to a Pakistani passport holder. The Americans also tracked the email trail of the VoIP account holder