Experts doubt Al Qaeda link in Mumbai attacks...

The men came wearing black hoods, firing automatic weapons and throwing grenades, taking hostages, attacking two hotels, a cinema, a café, a train station and other popular and undefended "soft targets."

An e-mail message to Indian media outlets that claimed responsibility for the bloody attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from the Deccan Mujahideen.

Global terrorism experts said Thursday they had never heard of the group. And based on its tactics, they said, it was probably not a cell or group linked to Al Qaeda.

"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism." "It could be a cover name for another group, or a name adopted just for this particular incident."

Chrtistine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested that the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims - and not linked to Al Qaeda or the violent South Asian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage taking, and they don't do grenades."

Hoffman agreed that the assault was "not exactly Al Qaeda's modus operandi, which is suicide attacks." But he said the timed attacks, which he called "tactical, sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the perpetrators. Fair also noted that the fact the group had not proclaimed its ideology in a manifesto was "not at all unusual."
"You don't see these types of terrorist operations very often, if at all," Hoffman said. "These aren't just a bunch of radical guys coming together to cause mayhem.

"This takes a different skill set. It doesn't take much skill to make a bomb. This is not just pressing a button as a suicide bomber and dying. You don't learn this over the Internet."
The word Deccan describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahideen, of course, is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. The very name - if it is a real group - suggests a domestic agenda.

"It's maybe not so much a group as a cell that will take on a name for a specific operation," said Fair. "In India you hear these unusual names."
Fair did not agree that the attacks on Wednesday necessarily required deep planning and training.

"This wasn't something that required a logistical mastermind," she said. "These were not hardened targets. A huge train station with zero security. Two hotels with no security, both owned by Indians. Leopold's Café. How hard is it, really? It's not rocket science."
Fair believes the attacks could be "yet another manifestation of domestic terrorism" that has its genesis in a longstanding institutional discrimination against Muslims.

"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," she said, "The economic disparities are startling, and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India."
The CIA puts the population of India at 1.15 billion, with Hindus making up about 80 percent of the total and Muslims 13.4 percent.

Fair said one incident - "a watershed event" - that continues to anger Muslims were the riots that swept nearby Gujarat State in 2002. The violence killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people, most of them Muslims.

"The public political face of India says, 'Our Muslims have not been radicalized.' But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that's not true. India's Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.

"Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. 'Al Qaeda's in your toilet!' But this is a domestic issue. This is not India's 9/11."

For Hoffman, who has studied terrorism for more than 30 years, the Mumbai attacks are "alarming on a number of levels."

"It's not often that things in terrorism alarm me. So much is a repeat of what we see almost every day, like suicide bombings. There's no real innovation in terrorism, which is why 9/11 was so terrifying, because it was so innovative and heinously clever.

"But these attacks show how a handful of men, basically using weapons off the shelf, can paralyze a city and frustrate highly trained security forces. These attacks were calculated to spread alarm and anxiety - to put it quite frankly, to unhinge things - and that's exactly what they've done."

MUSLIMS... the most easy scapegoat in India!!

Every time a bomb goes off in some part of India, the needle of suspicion invariably turns to a “Muslim outfit’s terror network” (stressing on the Muslim part of the terror network) which, interestingly, always has a link with the Intelligence agency of Pakistan, whether it is the historical event of attack on the Indian parliament or the blast in Samjhuta Express or the Godhra train incident. But the truth behind this home-grown terror storm is actually revealed with the arrest of a serving Lt. Colonel and a retired Major in connection with Malegaon and Modasa blast. The Mumbai police and central security agencies are probing the role of some more members of the armed forces, including another high-ranking official, for funding the incident.

The Maharashtra police are said to have cracked the September 29 bomb blasts in Malegaon and Modasa town in neighbouring Gujarat saying these were allegedly carried out by the Hindu Jagran Manch, an Indore-based Hindu extremist group known to have links to the BJP’s student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) whereas, Interestingly, The BJP had condemned both the blasts... now that’s called real diplomacy!

Police say Lt-Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit of Army Education Corps is accused of providing logistical support for Hindu militants to make bombs. Purohit was working with the Army Liaison Cell, a front of Military Intelligence, and was learning Chinese and Arabic in Panchmari in Madhya Pradesh. At least nine other people - including a retired army major, Ramesh Upadhyay - have already been detained in the case.

Both bombs were placed on motorcycles parked in crowded areas days before Eid and set off after Muslims had broken their Ramzan fast on a Monday evening. Investigators (as usual) initially suspected Islamist groups such as SIMI or the Indian Mujahideen to be behind the near-simultaneous attacks, ignoring the fact that most of the population in Malegaon is Muslim.

So far, Anti-Terrorist Squad have arrested three persons including a ’sadhvi’ (Pragnya Singh ) in connection with the blast. Pragnya is a ’sadhvi’ who had taken ’sanyas’ (leaving the world for god) in 2007. The motorcycle that was used in the bomb blast, guised with an Islamic sticker, also belonged to Pragna.

Few months earlier, two members of a Hindu organization were found involved in making of low-intensity bombs, but involvement of a woman in the bomb blasts is the most shocking development. It is the new face of the Hindu terror where women are being utilized as a shield by these fanatics. Pragnya is a former member of Durga Vahini, the women wing of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).

VHP along with some other Hindu organizations always try to project themselves as ‘patriotic’ groups but always remain in search of appropriate time to target the minority communities probably to prove their religious patriotism.

Interestingly, Sources said it was believed that some of the money from the funds, meant for operational purposes of Military Intelligence, had been allegedly siphoned off by Purohit for setting up the Abhinav Bharat, a little known saffron group, how convenient…!
Now this is called Intelligence with a Big capital “I” … where no body knew so far from where the funds are coming and where they are going.. and yet they have a courage to blame all their ills on Pakistan... Bravo!!