Terrorists weren't on suicide mission

Chennai: Coast Guard personnel on Thursday recovered an abandoned trawler called Kuber drifting in the high seas off the coast of Mumbai after receiving specific intelligence inputs from Naval Air surveillance.

Coast guards found the body of the boat’s captain Amar Singh Narayan, with his throat slit.

They also recovered a satellite phone and a GPS system containing the coordinates of return route. This suggests that the terrorists weren’t necessarily on a suicide mission.

Narayan and four other crew members, whose bodies could not be found, had left Porbandar, 310 nautical miles from Mumbai, on November 13.

Investigators are exploring the possibility of whether Kuber had entered the Pakistani territory and been hijacked by the terrorists.

Intelligence reports claim Kuber was the mother boat from which several inflatable boats carrying 26 terrorists were launched.

In the wake of recent event, Navy has submitted a report to the Government underscoring the need for advanced monitoring of the trawlers in Indian waters.

It has demanded that all coastal states set up a coastal police infrastructure. It sought a Naval Intelligence coordination mechanism to be set up so as to integrate intelligence gathering networks of coastal police, Coast Guard and the Navy.

The Navy also stipulated digitised licensing of each fishing vessel and smart ID cards for all fishermen. The smart cards will contain fishermen’s personal information, which can be digitally verified. The Navy also said that carrying a transponder for fishing vessels should be made mandatory so that each vessel out on the sea can be verified.

Navy says a proposal for Automatic Identification System (AIS) is pending with the government for the last two years.

Earlier, Home Ministry sources claimed that armed with RDX, M6 guns and grenades, terrorists reportedly took the sea route to enter Mumbai.

Interrogation of the one alleged terrorist, who was captured from Hotel Taj Palace by the National Security Guards (NSG) and Marine Commandos on Thursday, revealed the same information as the Home Ministry sources.

Amir Raza Kamal — one of the suspected terrorists — allegedly disclosed that they clambered into smaller boats before touching Mumbai shores at Sassoon Docks, following which they spread across Southern Bombay in pairs.

Earlier this year in an interview, India’s National Security Advisor M K Narayanan too had disclosed the threat perception to CNN-IBN.

“There was a team that had come once to India to do a reconnaissance, but the programme they had never worked out. But what is the LeT? The LeT is an integral part of al-Qaeda. So in a sense, you can say that the al-Qaeda is already present in India,” Narayanan had said.

The modus operandi behind Mumbai attacks is widely being seen as a repeat of 1993 serial blasts when a huge amount of ammunition had landed in the country via Konkan coast.

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