Is Google earth Map giving geography lessons to terrorists?

Google Earth is the seventh popular Internet application tool but it is being growingly misused by terror groups to have the first glimpse of sensitive places to plot attacks without moving an inch.

Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist Fahim Ahmed Ansari, arrested by Uttar Pradesh Police in Feburuary this year with maps and details of the spots hit during the recent terror attacks, in his statement had conceded that his masters showed him the maps on Google Earth to pin-point the specific targets.

The interrogation report of Fahim, who was trained at the Baitul Mujahideen camp in Pakistan in his statement said that a top Lashker commander 'Kahasa' asked him to show the spots in Mumbai on the Google Earth. "I was shown the map of Mumbai in Googleearth.com. Kahasa asked me to point out places in Mumbai he noted down and marked those places in the map," he told interrogators, adding, "I was first asked about my residence location and in-laws location in Mumbai."

Sensitive places like offices of Commissioner of Police and DGP, Gateway of India, Navy Nagar, Colaba, Taj Mahal Hotel, Mantralaya, Wankhede Stadium, Race Course, Church Gate Railway Station, Stock Exchange Building, BARC, Kalina Army Gate and other such spots were located and marked on the Google Earth Map.

Fahim, along with Sabauddin, were brought to Mumbai and remanded to police custody till December 31. They are being questioned to ascertain whether they had provided the minute details to Lashkar terrorists to help them plan the terror strike here on November 26.

Source; Agencies

Mumbai attack: A mixed bag for insurers

The bottomlines of insurance companies that have insured the terrorist-attacked hotels in Mumbai will not be affected by property damage claims as the loss will be met from a terrorism risk pool, managed by the state-run General Insurance Corp of India (GIC), say industry officials.

The claims for property damage as well as loss of profit will be met from the Rs.7.5-billion ($153 million) terrorism risk pool, they said.

However, insurers who have issued public liability policies to the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel and the Trident-Oberoi hotel, the targets of terrorists, and personal accident policies to employees with the risk of terrorism extension may have to face sizeable claims from the kin of the dead and the injured.

Though major portion of that could be reinsured, some part of the loss might have to be borne by the primary insures.

'Our liability policy covering the Trident-Oberoi hotel covers damage owing to acts of terrorism,' United India Insurance general manager A. Asthana told the media.

He said all these are reinsured with GIC.

The overall liability is around Rs.100 million ($2 million) and the risk is reinsured. The maximum net impact on the company will be around Rs.50 million, Asthana said.

Sitting comfortably among the insurers of the terrorist attacked hotels is the Mumbai-based New India Assurance that has insured only the properties of the Trident-Oberoi hotel.
Since the property damages will be met from the terrorism pool, New India would remain unscathed.

A long time insurer of Taj Mahal hotel property and employees, New India this year escaped as the account was bagged by three private insurers - Tata AIG General Insurance (65 percent share), ICICI Lombard General Insurance (30 percent) and IFFCO Tokio General Insurance (five percent).

According to industry officials, it will take at least two weeks for the insurance surveyors to assess the actual financial damage as the police and other investigating authorities have first to complete their job.

What will be tricky for the insurers are the liability claims that might be filed by the kin of the dead and injured guests at the hotels.

According to sources, the companies that will be in a spot are United India and Tata AIG, which have issued public liability policies covering terrorism risk respectively for Trident-Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels.

The two insurers will have to deal with sizeable claims under this policy as hundreds of hotel guests and visitors were killed and injured.

While United India is the sole seller of the Hoteliers Liability Policy to Trident-Oberoi, it is unclear whether Tata AIG has a co-insurance arrangement with other non-life insurers for this risk. Tata AIG officials could not be reached.

Source: Agencies

Mumbai 26/11 ends after 60 long hours!

The war on terror in Mumbai was finally wrapped up 60 hours after a band of terrorists struck at various locations with three gunmen killed this morning at the landmark luxury Taj Hotel, bringing the operation to a close.

NSG commandos, who believed that a lone terrorist was holding out since yesterday, launched a final assault in the early hours of this morning and killed three terrorists to secure the old heritage area of the hotel opposite the Gateway of India.

"Three terrorists have been killed but the operations are still on. Until we search the entire hotel room by room and satisfy ourselves that there are no more terrorists I will not declare the operations are over.

"I don't know whether all of them have been killed. I can say only after completing the operations," Director General of NSG, J K Dutt, told reporters outside the hotel.

During the night, terrorists holed out in the hotel engaged in a fierce gun battle with security forces as some places in the first and the ground floors of the 565-room building set afire by terrorists amid explosions in the over 100-year-old heritage complex in the Colaba area.

Dutt said that the terrorists set on fire some rooms whenever they felt they were being cornered as a diversionary tactics.

An intense gun battle raged overnight at the Taj as commandos closed in on terrorists holed up in the heritage structure. Five huge explosions were also heard in the building in a span of 30 minutes.

The Marine commandos (Marcos) had surrounded the Taj where NSG personnel were carrying out the operation to flush out the terrorists. Multiple rounds of automatic gunfire and blasts from inside the building shattered several hours of relative calm.

The western metropolis witnessed unprecedented terror attacks, including on another luxury Trident-Oberoi hotel and a Jewish centre, on Wednesday night when heavily-armed terrorists struck killing over 160 people and injuring hundreds.

The might of the Indian security forces had to be brought in to rid these landmark in the country's financial capital of the heavily-armed suspected Pakistani terrorists, but the costs were heavy on both sides.

When the Oberoi was cleared of the terrorists yesterday, as many as 30 hostages were found dead.

Source: PTI

Mumbai Liberated: But will this be its wake-up call?

Just as the images of billowing smoke from the twin towers of New York are seared in the memories of people all television visuals of the raging fire in the ornate façade of Mumbai's iconic Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel will be recalled whenever the deadly terrorist attack on India's financial capital Nov 26-29 is mentioned. The booming sound of gunfire as the security forces engaged the jehadis will also become a part of the nation's collective memory.

Although Mumbai is no stranger to such outrages - the Taj itself experienced a car bomb attack in 2003 - the latest tragedy stands out from the rest for the simple reason that it was an evidently commando-style raid by suicide bombers with the express purpose of inflicting as much damage as possible on some of the city's landmarks and targets of its prosperity and progress.

While in the earlier attacks, the terrorists planted bombs in market places or trains and then left the scene, this time they stayed on to battle the security forces and die or be captured in the process. Since they were all heavily armed and were able to take hostages, they could carry on the confrontation with the police for prolonged periods, which could not but have a hugely demoralising effect on the city and the country. Since India had not seen such war-like scenes before, the impact was devastating and it would take some time before its political fallout could be measured.

It is possible that the terror groups had realised the diminishing effect of their earlier tactics of planting bombs in crowded places and vehicles. In spite of the initial shock and revulsion in those instances, the effect tended to wear off, leaving only the victims to mourn their losses. But gunbattles lasting for hours and the wheeling out of bodies covered in white sheets from five-star hotels can have a numbing effect.

Source: IANS

Are hotels world over a soft target for terrorists?

Attacks on two luxury hotels -The Taj and Trident- in the country's financial capital Mumbai have drawn attention again to the fact that hotels are a soft target for terrorists who want to capture world attention to their causes. The Mumbai incident follows previous attempts on hotels elsewhere in the world, one such incident in the recent past in Islamabad where a deadly blast targeted the Marriott hotel near Pakistan's Parliament, killing at least 40 people and wounded another 200.

In 2005 in Jordan, Al Qaeda conducted a series of coordinated bombing on three hotels in the capital city Amman on November 9. The blasts at at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, the Radisson SAS Hotel, and the Days Inn killed 60 people and injured 115 others.

Oen of the hotels was hosting a wedding with hundreds of guests. In October 2004, bombings at three sites on the east coast of the Sinai peninsula killed 34 people.

The Egyptian government said the mastermind was Palestinian and the targets appeared to be Israeli tourists. On August 5, 2003, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the lobby of the JW Marriott Hotel in Indonesian capital Jakarta killing 12 people, including one Danish, one Dutch and two Chinese and injuring 150.

The hotel was viewed as a symbol of Western power and thus been the prime focus of terrorists. Another reason why hotels are being targeted is because of the kind of clientele, experts say.

Mumbai being the financial capital of the country at the centre of economic decision making there are numerous important delegates checking into one of the seven or five star hotels in the city.

Source: PTI

Mumbai attacks: Are other cities not vulnerability?

Whatever group lies behind the attacks in Mumbai, security experts say one thing has been made abundantly clear: a massive city can be reduced to mayhem if a group of men is well-enough armed and prepared to die.

Rather than hijacking planes as in September 11, or smuggling delicately wired car bombs into a city, the Mumbai gunmen chose a frontal style of armed assault, killing more than 100 people, wounding around 250 and causing immense panic in a thriving city of 13 million.

Security specialists say the attack was probably months in the planning and appears to have been finely tuned in its execution, but it ultimately relied on only an estimated 25 gunmen lightly armed with assault rifles and hand-grenades.

Their ability to roam around and sustain the attack, while all the while being willing to die in the onslaught, made it all the more difficult to combat and far more drawn out than an instantaneous suicide bomb attack might have been.

"It's virtually impossible to stop 20 guys with guns from attacking anywhere in the world if they are prepared to die," said Sajjan Gohel, an analyst with the Asia-Pacific Foundation, an independent security and intelligence group based in London.

"That is the thing about the fedayeen strategy," he said, using an Arabic term used to describe self-sacrificial gunmen who have operated in Iraq, Kashmir and across the Muslim world.

"It's even more effective than a suicide mission. With a suicide mission, you blow up your explosives and you're gone. With a fedayeen attack, you try to last out as long as possible, killing as many people as possible," he told Reuters.

Nearly 20 hours after the attack began late on Wednesday night, Indian soldiers and the militants were still exchanging gunfire and more than 100 people were trapped inside the Taj Mahal hotel, one of two five-star hotels popular with Western tourists and businessmen that were targeted in the assault.

Indian authorities closed stock, bond and foreign exchange markets, schools were shuttered and panicked foreigners on holiday or on business were desperate to flee, reducing India's business powerhouse to a tense, semi-warzone.

"Men armed with automatic weapons are able to run amok and keep the situation going for much, much longer," Henry Wilkinson, a senior analyst with Janusian Security Risk Management, a London-based consultancy, told Reuters.

"Whether it's intended or not, that creates an extended drama which is all the more terrifying."

AL QAEDA

Given the boldness of the assault, its high-level of planning and the fact that foreigners were specifically targeted, security specialists believe there is likely to have been a degree of inspiration from or link to external groups allied to Al Qaeda, such as the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.

They say the tactics are different from the more common, post-9/11 attacks seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, but still bear similar hallmarks.

"It's very interesting that they didn't go in using car bombs, it was more of a direct armed assault on a city," said Wilkinson. "It's very reminiscent of the attacks in Saudi Arabia in 2003, when the gunmen were going around trying to find Westerners and kill them."

Wilkinson highlighted the fact the Mumbai gunmen appeared to have used only assault rifles and hand-grenades, giving them much more mobility and freeing them up to take hostages.

"I would suggest that using guns and hand-grenades was a deliberate choice... The amount of planning and training they must have done to carry out such an attack is impressive."

Such an assault might be mounted virtually anywhere in the world, he said, making cities in Europe and the United States vulnerable, even if such an outcome remains unlikely.

In London in 2005 four suicide bombers killed 52 people on public transport and brought the city to a standstill.

Both attacks underline just how hard it is for democratic states to protect themselves against such attacks without draconian security measures and powerful intelligence.

"I can't see any reason -- if there is a terrorist group that has the capability... attacks like this in Europe or the United States can't be discounted," he said.

One advantage for Indian authorities and any intelligence services called in to help investigate the Mumbai attacks is that at least nine gunmen are reported to have been seized.

In a suicide bombing, forensics can help investigators establish only so much. In this case, those detained are likely to reveal much more intelligence about who plotted the attack.

"The fact that a few of them have been seized is highly significant," said Wilkinson. "I think a lot more information about these attacks and who was behind them is going to come to light."

Source: Reuters

Who are the militants behind the Mumbai attacks?

Militants armed with automatic weapons and grenades attacked luxury hotels, hospitals and a famous tourist cafe in India's commercial capital Mumbai late on Wednesday, killing at least 101 people.

Who is behind the attacks?

Witnesses say the attackers were young South Asian men speaking Hindi or Urdu, suggesting they are probably members of an Indian militant group rather than foreigners.

The attacks were claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen in an e-mail to news organisations. Deccan is an area of southern India. Analysts say that while it is not clear whether the claim is genuine, the attacks were most likely carried out by a group called the Indian Mujahideen. The name used in the claim of responsibility suggests the attackers could be members of a south Indian offshoot or cell of the Indian Mujahideen.

Who are the Indian Mujahideen?

Indian police say the Indian Mujahideen is an offshoot of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), but that local Muslims appear to have been given training and backing from militant groups in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

SIMI has been blamed by police for almost every major bomb attack in India, including explosions on commuter trains in Mumbai two years ago that killed 187 people.

Police said the Indian Mujahideen may also include former members of th Bangladeshi militant group Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami.

In an e-mail to various media in September, the group denounced Mumbai's police anti-terrorist squad, accusing them of harassing Muslims.

"If this is the degree your arrogance has reached, and if you think that by these stunts you can scare us, then let the Indian Mujahideen warn all the people of Mumbai that whatever deadly attacks Mumbaikars will face in future, their responsibility would lie with the Mumbai ATS and their guardians," it said.

The Indian Mujahideen have made credible claims of responsibility for most of the recent major attacks on civilian targets in India over the past two years.

The Mumbai attacks appear to have been carefully co-ordinated, well-planned and involved a large number of attackers. A high level of sophistication has also been a hallmark of previous attacks by the Indian Mujahideen.

The Mumbai attacks also focused clearly on tourist targets, including two luxury hotels and a famous cafe.

In May, the Indian Mujahideen made a specific threat to attack tourist sites in India unless the government stopped supporting the United States in the international arena.

The threat was made in an e-mail claiming responsibility for bomb attacks that killed 63 people in the tourist city of Jaipur. The e-mail, signed by "Guru Al-Hindi", declared "open war against India" and included the serial number of one of the bicycles on which the bombs were left.

Witnesses in Mumbai say the attackers in Mumbai singled out Americans and Britons in their attacks.

The group first emerged during a wave of bombings in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in November 2007, sending an e-mail to media outlets just before some of the bombs exploded. Their next attacks were the Jaipur blasts.

On July 25, eight small bomb attacks in the IT city of Bangalore on July 25 that killed at least one person and wounded 15. There was no known claim of responsibility.

But a day later, at least 16 bombs exploded in Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat, killing 45 and wounding 161. Shortly before the blasts, an e-mail in the name of the Indian Mujahideen was sent to local media warning that people would soon "feel the terror of death" in the name of Allah.

It said the attacks were revenge for the Gujarat riots of 2002, when around 2,500 people, most of them Muslims, were killed by Hindu mobs. A later e-mail accused several state governments of harassing, imprisoning and torturing Muslims and threatened consequences if they did not stop.

In September, at least five bombs exploded in crowded markets and streets in New Delhi, killing at least 18 people. The Indian Mujahideen sent out an e-mail moments after the first blast in New Delhi, saying the explosions were to prove its capability to strike in the most secure of Indian cities.

All previous incidents in which the Indian Mujahideen are suspected of involvement involved co-ordinated serial bombs. The Mumbai attacks also show clear signs of co-ordination but were carried out by gunmen, some carrying grenades.

The tactics, a military-style assault on soft targets, singling out foreigners, and taking hostages, are rare and do not fit the usual methods of militant attacks on civilian areas.

However, similar attacks have been carried out before, notably the May 2004 attacks in the eastern Saudi city of Khobar.

Gunmen attacked two oil industry installations and a foreign workers' housing complex in the city, taking more than 50 hostages and killing 22 of them. The attackers asked hostages whether they were Christian or Muslim before deciding whom to kill.

Source: Reuters

Bloggers feed frenzy info on Mumbai blasts!

Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates of the action after Islamist gunmen launched waves of attacks in the heart of India's financial capital, highlighting the emergence of citizen journalism in news coverage.

Some, including a blogger named Vinu, were furiously uploading photos of damage from the attacks that killed at least 101 people and injured 287, with scores of foreigners, including Westerners trapped in luxury hotels.

Images of the attacks also surfaced on photo-sharing website Flickr.Some bloggers provided running descriptions and commentaries from near the action, while others vented emotions."I've been tweeting almost all night, too, from Mumbai. Upset and angry and bereft," said businesswoman Dina Mehta on her blog, www.dinamehta.com/blog.Twitter, the wildly popular "micro-blogging" site where users communicate with short "tweets" of 140 characters or less, saw intense activity on Thursday.

Within five seconds at 0748 GMT, 80 messages were posted. Posts included offers of help for the media and updates on the situation."One terrorist has jumped from Nariman house building to Chabad house - group of police commandos have arrived on scene," one tweeter wrote.

Twitter came in for some criticism as well in the blogosphere for divulging too many details that could prove helpful to the gunmen holed up in the hotels with their hostages and who may have been been monitoring blog sites.

"It's a terrorist strike. Not entertainment. So tweeters, please be responsible with your tweets," said one blogger identified as primaveron@mumbai.Several local Indian news channels were reported to have carried a live feed of the twitter updates on the Mumbai attacks.

Source: Reuters