Remembering the night of 26/11: The date that sends an eerie shudder unto our spines

Mumbai: It was on this day in 2008 that Mumbai, India’s financial capital was held to ransom by a group of Pakistani terrorists who landed in the city via sea route.

Over 166 people, including foreign nationals, were killed in the attack that lasted for four days. The 26/11 attack, which transformed India’s outlook towards national security and led to strengthening its maritime surveillance and inter-agency coordination and dissemination of information, witnessed 10 Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists going on a killing spree in the buzzing metropolis during peak hours.

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For all the anti-terrorism measures adopted by the United States in the aftermath of the devastating 9/11 attack, a Pakistani-American was able to go to India and plot an attack that killed his fellow-countrymen, probably operating right under the nose of the security establishment.

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Daood Sayed Gilani, who used the name David Coleman Headley, made five spy missions to India on behalf of the Pakistan government-back terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba to map out its deadly 26/11 raid in 2008 in which ten Pakistanis killed 165 people, including six Americans, and wounded more than 300 people.

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He has admitted to working for both the LeT and the Pakistani spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He also likely had links to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic state.

The actions of Gilani, who worked for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) supposedly as an informant, in the US, India, Pakistan and Europe remain a mystery.

The US has admitted to intelligence shortcomings in not being able to connect him in time to the Mumbai attacks, although it has asserted that it had provided India with other information about an impending attack on the city in 2008.

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ProPublica, an independent non-profit investigative journalism organisation that looked into the Gilani/Headley case, has asserted that US officials had bungled several tipoffs they received till it was too late.

He was arrested by the US authorities in 2009 only after he became involved in spying for attacks in Denmark against a newspaper that published pictures of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam.

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