Click to play videoNew Delhi: The Mumbai Police was severely handicapped during terrorist attacks on the city on November 26 last year because it lacked weapons, bulletproof jackets and communication equipment, says a committee probing the government’s response to the attacks.
The supervision and coordination of the police force and the infrastructural support was of poor and inadequate, says the Ram Pradhan committee’s report, which has been accessed by the CNN-IBN.
The report confirms that the police were given inadequate bulletproof jackets, like the one worn by Hemant Karkare, chief of Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorist Squad, who was killed by terrorists on November 26.
Karkare’s jacket was of 1993 vintage and weighed at least 10 kgs--futile against the heavy gunfire from terrorists. "The Mumbai police did not have adequate protective gear like bulletproof vests or anything to withstand grenade attacks," says the Pradhan committee report.
That the police were outgunned on November 26 is no surprise considering that they were not given ammunition for firing practice for two years. "After December 2006, no ammunition has been received. The last supply of AK-47 rounds was 45,000 in 2005,” says the report.
"Since September 27, 2007 no firing practice was done due to shortage of practice ammunition."
The report states “that even special assault teams, QRTs (quick response teams) and mobile teams were under-equipped with only lathis, gas guns and .303 rifles which were no match to the superior fire power of the terrorists, who carried AK-47 assault rifles, pistols, and hand grenades."
Additional Commissioner Sadanand Date took on terrorists at Cama Hospital, but his pistol simply did not fire. The police’s communication equipment was no better.
The report says the police "lacks modern communication equipments/systems while facing a serious situation like 26/11 when all the communication channels got clogged."
The police were taken completely off guard by the terrorists, but it is not that they had not been warned. The report says that there were several intelligence warnings as early as August 2006 indicating that the Lashkar-e-Toiba militant group was preparing to infiltrate terrorists into India through the sea. As many as six intelligence alerts warned of a possible sea-borne attack and eleven on a possible fidayeen attack.
The intelligence alerts said the Taj and Oberoi Hotels and the CST Railway terminus could be possible targets of terrorists, but the state government and the police failed to step up security at these places.
"There was total confusion in the processing of intelligence alerts at the level of state government and police," says the report.
On the night of November 26, the confusion and the failures of the system showed up.
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