New Report on Surveillance of Mumbai Plotters

By Jeralyn, Section Blog Related
Posted on Mon Dec 22, 2014 at 08:12:00 AM EST
Tags: Mumbai Attacks, David Coleman Headly, Zarrar Shah (all tags)

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Pro Publica, the New York Times and Frontline have a joint report on the failure of India and the UK to connect the dots regarding plotters of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The report is largely about Zarrar Shah (real name Abdul Wajid), the chief technology guy for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and cites documents released by Edward Snowden. It also notes the failure of the U.S. to connect the dots on David Coleman Headley. Headley is serving 35 years for his role in the attacks, after making a cooperation deal with the Government to avoid the death penalty. (Headley is the twice convicted heroin dealer who became a DEA informant and with the Government's blessing, was allowed to go to Pakistan and let off supervised release early. The Transcript is here.) [More...]

Headley ended up joining and training with L.e.T. Pakistan claimed he was a non-credible double agent. (Official response here.) The Times of India asked the same thing.

The report questions whether the attacks could have been prevented if the governments who had Shah under surveillance had connected the dots.

Since the report doesn't include the actual documents it is relying on, I can't tell what information India and the UK had before the attacks and what they learned shortly after. Here is one of India's dossiers, which in the section on Technical evidence (pp. 35 to 38), explains the VOIP, telephone and internet