Mumbai attackers went high-tech

MUMBAI — As evidence mounted of a Pakistan link to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last week, emerging details about the 60-hour siege suggest the attackers made sophisticated use of high technology in planning and carrying out the assault that killed at least 174 people and wounded more than 300.

Indian police said for the first time on Tuesday that all of the Mumbai attackers came by ship from the Pakistani port of Karachi.

The allegations, made by the chief of the Mumbai police in a televised news conference, came as India demanded that Pakistan hand over 20 fugitives it says have taken refuge in the country, including Masood Azhar, leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, one of the most violent Islamic militant groups in Pakistan, and Yusuf Muzammil, a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that Indian authorities say carried out the assault on Mumbai. Azam Amir Kasab, the lone gunman captured amid the carnage, named Muzammil as the mastermind of the operation, according to some reports.

The heavily armed attackers who set out for Mumbai by sea last week navigated with Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police.

They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track. They spoke by satellite telephone.

And as TV channels broadcast live coverage of the young men carrying out the terrorist attack, TVs were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the gunmen, eyewitnesses recalled.

The flood of information about the attacks — on TV, cellphones, the Internet — seized the attention of a terrified city, but it also was exploited by the assailants to direct their fire and cover their origins. This is terrorism in the digital age.

During the attacks, an organization calling itself Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility in an e-mail to news outlets that was traced to a computer server in Moscow, according to Praveen Swami, a terrorism expert and media commentator. The message, it was later discovered, originated in Lahore, Pakistan. Investigators have said the e-mail was produced using Urdu-language voice-recognition software to "anonymatize" regional spellings and accents so police would be unable to identify their ethnic or geographic origins.

When the gunmen called back to their leaders, they used satellite telephones calling voice-over-Internet-protocol phone numbers, making the calls harder to trace, Swami said. Once on the scene, they snatched cellphones from hostages — both alive and dead — and used those to stay in contact with one another.

At every point, Swami said, the gunmen used technology to gain a tactical advantage.

"This was technologically a pretty sophisticated group. They navigated their way to Mumbai using a state-of-the-art GPS system. Most of their rehearsals to familiarize themselves with Mumbai were done on high-resolution satellite maps, so they would have a good feel for the city's streets and buildings where they were going," Swami said, adding that the CDs containing maps and videos were found in some of the hotel rooms the gunmen had occupied during the siege.

Kasab, the captured gunman, told police he was shown video of the targets and the Google Earth images before the attacks, said Deven Bharti, an official in the crime branch of the Mumbai police.

Mumbai police chief Hassan Gafoor, offering the first official details of how the siege was conducted, said at a news conference Tuesday: "Technology is advancing every day. We try to keep pace with it."

But several Indian analysts pointed out that the country's police are still equipped with World War II-era rifles, lagging behind the technology curve when it comes to cybercriminals and Internet-savvy gunmen. And although there are closed-circuit TVs in the luxury hotels, some office buildings, banks, airports and rail stations, they are not nearly as pervasive as in the United States. There has been criticism that, like the metal detectors, many closed-circuit cameras don't work or go unmonitored.

The security forces on the ground, including the elite special forces unit popularly known as Black Cats, had little access to night-vision goggles or thermal-imaging capability to help them pinpoint where people were located in the hotels, said Ajay Sahni, executive director of New Delhi's Institute for Conflict Management.

The elite 7,400-strong National Security Guard commandos — who arrived in Mumbai at least eight hours after the attackers struck to dislodge them from two hotels — don't have their own aircraft, Sahni said.

"When they finally got there, they had no floor layouts of the hotel, let alone high-tech devices," he added.

When TV stations showed every twist and turn of the masked Black Cat commandos sliding down ropes from helicopters to rooftops near a Jewish outreach center called the Chabad House, the Mumbai government shut down news channels, taking live coverage off the air for 45 minutes, fearing that the attackers were monitoring the screens, ruining the commandos' crucial element of surprise.

"How terrorists used our thirst for 24/7 news to succeed," read a front-page story in the Hindustan Times in the aftermath of the assault.

Several TV stations, including the national news station Times Now, told their anchors to stop reporting on the positions of commandos. Security experts also say the attacks were an alarm bell for India's intelligence agencies, which in the past have complained that Google Earth images contained too much detail about military sites and other defense installations.

"Where in the rule book does it say that terrorists are not allowed to use technology that is readily available to almost anyone?" Sahni said.

Compiled from The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Associated Press and McClatchy Newspapers