The Making of a Mumbai Terrorist

Rawalpindi is not a city where fortunes are made. It is a refuge for those seeking relief from the backbreaking labors of rural life and a home for those fleeing the violence on Pakistan's troubled frontier with Afghanistan. 'Pindi, as it is known, may be a stifling metropolis where crime goes unpunished and hard work unrewarded, but it also offers a chance at the first rung of a very long ladder toward financial stability. Yet that ladder goes only so high. The greensward of the Rawalpindi Golf Club teases the poor with dreams of the good life, but its gates are firmly closed. In Rawalpindi, there are no holes in the fence that divides the classes.

That doesn't stop people from trying to slip through. It was in Rawalpindi that Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, the surviving gunman from the terrorist massacre that claimed 165 lives in Mumbai last November, took his first step toward infamy. In 2007 he visited a market stall run by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), an Islamist extremist group that has been blamed for the Mumbai attacks, among others. Qasab, at the time, was neither particularly religious nor particularly violent — just one of millions of poor young men in South Asia trying to cross the fence to a better life, existing in a shadow land between aspiration and extremism. (See pictures of a Jihadist's journey.)

What makes Qasab unusual is not that his story is rare but that we know its outlines. After he and Ismail Khan, the leader of the attack, shot up the Victoria Terminus railway station in Mumbai, they were stopped by police at a roadblock. Khan was killed, but Qasab was taken into custody, and he dictated a long confession to Mumbai police. TIME has obtained a copy. As a legal document, it is of questionable value; it was almost certainly obtained under duress and has been widely circulated. But as a narrative of the transformation of a country boy into a jihadist, it is believable and — more than that — important. Understand Qasab's story and you begin to understand why young men throw in their lot with Islamic extremists, why Pakistan may be the most dangerous country in the world, why the half-century-long dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is not just a local problem, why education reform in the poor world is an issue of national security in the rich one — and why draining the swamps in which terrorism is spawned has been so difficult.

Going Underground
In the early 1990s, Pakistan was in a state of euphoria. Islamic holy warriors, many from cities like Rawalpindi, had defeated the Soviet army in Afghanistan, and jihad was on everyone's lips. In 1990, Muslims in Kashmir — the Himalayan territory that India and Pakistan have been arguing and fighting over since 1948 — rose up against Indian rule, and the mujahedin soon found a new cause. The Pakistani military used the jihadi movement, hoping that guerrilla warfare would destabilize its enemy India where conventional warfare failed. Jihadi groups in Pakistan collected donations for Kashmir. Young men signed up for training camps, where they concentrated on physical fitness and learned how to use weapons. Jihad wasn't just a diversion from ordinary life; it was a rite of passage. (Read: "India: After the Horror.")

But after Sept. 11, 2001, everything changed. Pakistan, given no choice by the U.S., stopped supporting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had allowed jihadi training camps to flourish on its soil. On Dec. 13, 2001, a band of Pakistan-based fighters attacked the Indian Parliament. Two weeks later, the U.S. government placed LeT, one of the jihadi groups thought to be behind the attack, on its list of proscribed organizations. The next month, Pakistan's then President, General Pervez Musharraf, bowed to international pressure and declared that no Pakistan-based group would be allowed to commit terrorism in the name of religion. Musharraf banned five jihadi groups that his army had long nurtured. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.)

To Musharraf's interlocutors in Washington, this must have sounded like progress. But his decision just shunted the jihadist mentality underground. With a nod and a wink, organizations like LeT re-emerged under new names. The camps were officially closed, but training shifted to hideaways deep in the mountains, where government officials could ignore them. Recruitment continued, strengthened by the perception of unjust — and U.S.-driven — persecution of Muslims.

It was in this climate of official duplicity that Qasab arrived in Rawalpindi. He was not seeking his shortcut to heaven. Rather, he says in his confession, he followed a friend in search of riches. "As we were not getting enough money, we decided to carry out robbery," he says, and they scoped out a house.

That was a common choice. "Robbing houses is easier than finding a job in 'Pindi," says Imran Asghar, a crime reporter for the English-language Daily Times. But to rob a house, Qasab needed weapons. So on Dec. 19, 2007, an important Muslim holiday, he set out for Raja Bazaar, a congested boulevard crammed with gun shops and decorated with hand-painted billboards portraying men hoisting AK-47s. Seeking guns in Raja Bazaar was an amateur move (even in 'Pindi, without a license, you won't get a gun from a shop), but it led Qasab to a LeT stall that had been set up for the holiday. "We thought that even if we procured firearms, we could not operate them," he says in the confession. "Therefore, we decided to join LeT for weapon training."

Qasab does not say in his confession if he ever robbed the house. It doesn't really matter. Crime and terrorism are intertwined — illicit weapons-trading, drugs, smuggling and kidnap-for-ransom schemes fund terrorist networks all around the world. In Pakistan, the connection is deeply ingrained. "When someone commits a crime," says Asghar, "there are so many hands to support him but so few to pull him out. And if I feel guilty for what I have done, I go to mosque. There I am invited to jihad, and I am given a license for paradise. That is where crime and terrorism meet." From the LeT stall, Qasab was directed to the group's offices, where after a brief interview, he was given the address of a training camp and money for the bus. He was on his way.

The Banality of Terror
It would be convenient to think of Qasab as a psychopath, exploited by cynical handlers who corrupt young men in the name of religion. In fact, his origins are ordinary. In his confession, Qasab, now 21, says he was born in the village of Faridkot, in Pakistan's Punjab province. He is said to have been a typical teenager, not especially religious, albeit with a reputation as a troublemaker. His family is poor — his father sells fried snacks at a bus station — but owns its own house. Qasab attended the local primary school; at 13, he left the village to live and work with his elder brother in Lahore.

Qasab's is the classic profile of a jihadi, according to Pakistani psychologist Sohail Abbas. In 2002, Abbas interviewed 517 men who had been jailed for going to fight U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Unlike the stereotypical image of a terrorist — illiterate, fanatic and trained in madrasahs, or religious seminaries — the men had relatively high levels of literacy and were more likely to have been educated in government schools than in madrasahs. Religion wasn't necessarily the only reason they turned to jihad. A Pakistani who enrolled in a training camp in Kunar province, Afghanistan, told TIME that he went for "tourism and adventure."

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Faridkot is not the hardscrabble village conjured up by common perceptions of extremist origins. It straddles a paved road about 2 1⁄2 hours' drive from Lahore, and two new gas stations mark the village boundaries. Beyond those are factories and fertile farmland. There is even BlackBerry service. But it is, undeniably, the sort of place that fosters frustration. Feudal landlords own the farmland, and villagers feel trapped by the status they are born into. The good life is tantalizingly close, yet for most residents still unattainable. For men like Qasab, one of the best ways out is jihad. "In a developing country, youngsters who are sensitive, concerned, they talk about 'How do we change what is going on here? How do we get rid of corruption?'" says Abbas. "And if in some sense you find that jihad can help you in those aims, then why not?" It's a convolution of the adolescent craving to stand out. And Pakistani society, steeped in nihilistic passions fostered by the state sponsorship of jihad, condones it.

District governor Ghulam Mustafa (who denies that Qasab is from Faridkot) says the area has a long history of sending men to fight in Kashmir. Despite the risks, joining a militant network provides social mobility that is virtually unattainable in Pakistani society, giving the groups' members a sense of purpose and pride and elevating their status, says Muhammad Amir Rana, a Pakistani expert on extremist groups. And indeed, villagers have told journalists that when Qasab went home to see his family just before the Mumbai attacks, he was a changed man — calm, with a sense of purpose and able to demonstrate his new fighting skills. ((See pictures of a Jihadist's journey.))

These days, his neighbors have stopped telling stories about Qasab, and journalists are no longer welcome. But before they were excluded from the village, a correspondent from the English-language daily Dawn was able to interview a man who said he was Qasab's father. "I was in denial for the first couple of days, saying to myself it could not have been my son," Amir Qasab told Dawn. "Now I have accepted it." A few years back, said Amir Qasab, he and his son had a quarrel while he was home visiting. "He had asked me for new clothes on 'Id [a religious holiday] that I couldn't provide him. He got angry and left."

A Sort of School
Where that angry scene ends, Qasab's confession seems to pick up. According to the document, Qasab fled his family in 2005 for Ali Hajveri Darbar, a shrine in Lahore dedicated to the memory of a Sufi saint who took Islam to the region through his example of love, charity and direct communication with God. It was a place, Qasab says, where "boys who had run away from their houses are kept." The shrine doesn't have sleeping quarters, says volunteer caretaker Muhammad Soheil, but "many people stay in the nearby area and come here to take our food." Thousands visit the shrine every day, says Soheil, and he has no recollection of Qasab. But, he says, "We believe that if someone comes here with bad intentions, they will become good Muslims."

The evolving strengths of different strains of Islam in South Asia provide an important context for Qasab's tale. In 2007 the Rand Corp. suggested that such groups as Pakistan's Sufi-influenced Barelvi sect — which does not have a jihadist bent — be encouraged in order to combat extremism. But since the anti-Soviet war, Wahhabi groups, drawing their influence from Saudi Arabia's austere brand of Islam — together with the Wahhabis' South Asian counterparts, the ¬Deobandis — have gained ground in Pakistan. Soheil decries the Wahhabi focus on jihad. "Here we teach peace and love in the way of the Prophet," he says. "The problem is that the common people are not literate, so when the cleric says they will go to heaven if they do suicide bombs, they become entrapped and believe him." (See pictures of Pakistan's vulnerable North-West Frontier Province.)

For whatever reason, life at the Darbar was not enough for Qasab. He found employment, but after two years, his paltry salary began to rankle him, and he left Lahore to seek his fortune in Rawalpindi.

The LeT office in Rawalpindi directed Qasab to the sprawling campus of the Markaz-al-Dawa wal-Irshad in the town of Muridke, about half an hour's drive from Lahore. Established in 1987 by a trio of veterans from the Afghan jihad with funding from Osama bin Laden, this Wahhabi center quickly became known as the launchpad for militant jihad. But it is much more. Within a few years, the Markaz had expanded to include a madrasah, separate schools for boys and girls, a free hospital and a university. Its founders, Hafiz Saeed, Zafar Iqbal and Abdullah Azzam — the latter was bin Laden's mentor until he was killed by a car bomb in Peshawar in 1989 — declared that their objective was to create a model Islamic environment removed from state interference. Education would focus on jihad but also emphasize science and technology. The campus includes stables, fishponds, playing fields, a foundry, a carpentry workshop, a mosque and computer-enabled classrooms. It is better equipped than most Pakistani state universities.

In his confession, Qasab describes a strict regimen of physical training, prayers and religious lectures at Muridke. Former LeT militants who have passed through the center say it was never a training camp in the traditional sense. While would-be militants learned to swim and fight there, advanced weapons training was left for the camps in the Pakistani-controlled section of Kashmir. Only a handful of students were sent out on actual combat missions. Instead, most focused on religious doctrine. Parents in the local village who send their children to the Markaz for school say the education is good, though ideological. Ghulam Qadir, 44, has two children there, even though he follows the more liberal Barelvi tradition. School rules insist that even the primary students pray five times a day and fast during Ramadan. They are not allowed to watch TV or movies or listen to music. "I am hoping my children are not being converted, but I want them to have a better future," he says, explaining that the school is free and gives the students lunch.

The growth of Wahhabi institutions in traditionally Barelvi parts of Pakistan is not limited to Muridke. Punjab province has seen an explosion of radical mosques, madrasahs and schools, many around the southern cities of Bahawalpur and Multan. A resident of Bahawalpur describes a visible expansion of jihadi infrastructure, unchecked by government supervision. Camps modeled on the one at Muridke are being built in the city, and photographs of the construction sites show young men with AK-47 logos on their shirts. Graffiti on village walls in the region declare, "Jihad against unbelievers is mandatory. Break their necks and shake every bone."

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Rana, the expert on militancy, has seen an accompanying rise in extremist activity. He estimates that 60% of all terrorist attacks in Pakistan since 2002 have originated in the Punjab. "What the militant groups are doing now," says political analyst and academic Ayesha Siddiqa, "is recruiting people and sending them to fight elsewhere." Some are going to Kashmir, she says, but many more are fighting in Bajaur and Swat, in the North-West Frontier Province, where government forces are waging a losing war to contain militancy. Groups like LeT have always been open about their goals for an Islamic state, and few doubt that they would resort to violence to achieve it. Says Siddiqa: "At a later stage, they will bring the jihad home." It may already be happening. In the provincial capital of Lahore on March 3, a dozen gunmen attacked a convoy of Sri Lankan cricketers on their way to a match. Six policemen and a bus driver were killed and several more wounded. No group has taken responsibility, but the similarities to the orchestrated assaults in Mumbai were alarming. (See pictures of Mumbai sifting through the rubble.)

Killing for Paradise
The organizers at Muridke, however, had different plans for Qasab. After his initial training in the philosophy of jihad, he was sent to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, where he finally got the opportunity to handle a gun. "We were taken in a vehicle to a place called Mansera, [where] we were given training of all weapons for 21 days," Qasab says in his confession. In the subsequent four months of training, Qasab learned to fire AK-47s, studied the Indian security agencies and was trained in the "handling of hand grenade, rocket launchers and mortars, Uzi gun, pistol [and] revolver." Other LeT militants have noted the physical demands that accompanied the firearms practice. "The training was really tough," Mohammad Usman, a former jihadi, tells TIME. "But when we went to Kashmir, on my first operation across the Line of Control [which divides Pakistani-controlled Kashmir from the Indian side], I got separated from my group for 15 days. I had nothing, so the training helped."

Usman, now 36, was one of the founding militants in LeT — and his tale, too, sheds light on the growth of jihadi militancy. As a boy in the Punjabi city of Faisalabad, he often heard accounts of Indian atrocities against Muslims in Kashmir. In the early '90s, Kashmiris toured Pakistan, telling their stories and seeking donations for their cause. Usman was moved by the story of a man whose brother had been killed by Indian soldiers and whose sister had been sexually assaulted. "Then he asked, 'If this was your sister, what would you do?' That's when I decided to join the jihad." ((See pictures of a Jihadist's journey.))

In the beginning, Usman joined a Kashmiri militant outfit, but soon he banded together with other Pakistanis, including Saeed, to form LeT. "The Kashmiris appreciated us because we were good fighters," says Usman. "Unlike the Kashmiris, who only did hit-and-run attacks, we stayed and fought for hours." That confidence, he says, came from the training. "We were fearless. The Koran tells us that if we are martyred, we are successful. It is the misfortune of my life that I was not martyred."

The conviction that death in jihad would lead to paradise prompted LeT to develop its most devastating tactic in the fight against India: the fedayeen, or suicide squads. Instead of simply blowing themselves up, they conducted daring commando raids, trying to do as much damage as possible before their eventual martyrdom. In advance of each operation, the teams, with from two to 10 members, joined to pray. "We told each other, 'We will meet you again in the hereafter,'" says Usman.

While Qasab never mentions that he was part of such a unit, his preparation suggests that he had been chosen to learn fedayeen tactics, which are increasingly common outside Kashmir. For his final round of advanced training, Qasab moved to another camp near Muzaffarabad, also in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, where he says he met a man named Zaki-ur-Rehman "Chacha" (Uncle), who selected him as one of a team of 16 destined for a confidential operation. Qasab may have been referring to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a top LeT commander who was arrested by Pakistani security forces on Dec. 7 at a LeT compound just outside Muzaffarabad.

Missed Signals
Of the 16 selected for the operation, says Qasab, three ran away. The rest returned to Muridke, where for one month they were given swimming lessons and "acquainted with the environment experienced by a fisherman on a sea." (The fishpond on the Muridke campus, the size and shape of two Olympic-size pools placed at a right angle to each other, doubles as a swimming pool, a student told TIME.) While he was in Muridke, Qasab and his teammates attended lectures on the Indian intelligence agencies and watched videos highlighting atrocities committed against Muslims in India. Six of the 13 were dispatched to Kashmir; then three new members were brought into the group, according to the dossier on the attacks submitted by India to Pakistan, a copy of which was obtained by TIME. Now winnowed down to 10, the group was divided into two-person teams, and on Sept. 15 they were told their target: Mumbai.

The Mumbai attack was nominally conducted for the Kashmir struggle, but India has avoided linking the Mumbai attacks to Kashmir, and Qasab's confession does not mention it. Political leaders in Kashmir have deplored the barbarity of the attacks while acknowledging that Mumbai has drawn attention to their cause. For Qasab, the political implications of his mission were probably far from his mind as he went through the final stages of preparation. The commandos were shown images of Mumbai on Google Earth and told how to disembark from their boats. Qasab and his partner, Khan, were shown video footage of their designated target: Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, or Victoria Terminus, known in Mumbai as VT. The instructions were simple: "Carry out the firing at rush hours in the morning between 7 to 11 hours and between 7 to 11 hours in the evening. Then kidnap some persons, take them to the roof of some nearby building ... We were then to contact the media [and] make demands for releasing the hostages."

Qasab's final weeks of preparation were spent in a house near Karachi. It is possible that the attack had been compromised. In late September, India's Intelligence Bureau warned specifically about the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, and in mid-October, U.S. intelligence agencies warned that Mumbai was a target of an attack by sea. The hotel tightened its security and received extra protection from the Mumbai police. But nothing happened, and the security measures were relaxed in mid-November.

Qasab's group stole out of Karachi's harbor at 4:15 a.m. on Nov. 22. While port authorities say no one can leave the shore without permission, it would have been easy for the men to leave in a boat already registered with the harbormaster. There are at least 150 launches a day at the Karachi port, says Abbas Ali, who runs a launch business. "Once mariners reach the deep sea, they can do anything, smuggling, drugs, whatever. There are not enough people to check all the boats." From the launch, the team boarded another boat and then a ship named Al-Husseini, which is thought by Pakistani investigators to be registered in the name of an Islamist group associated with LeT. Each militant was given a sack containing "eight grenades, one AK-47 rifle, 200 cartridges, two magazines and one cell phone for communication."

Qasab and the team turned on their GPS devices at 6:54 a.m., establishing a spot near Koti Bandar, about 93 miles (150 km) southeast of Karachi, as their starting point. Al-Husseini encountered an Indian fishing trawler, the M.V. Kuber. Qasab's confession states that "once they reached Indian waters, the crew hijacked an Indian fishing vessel." But the Indian dossier and intelligence sources describe the scenario slightly differently: the sources suspect that the operator of the ship, Amar Singh Solanki, might have been lured into Pakistani waters with the promise of money for smuggling.

Solanki was asked to take a more dangerous cargo than contraband. His four employees were moved onto Al-Husseini, where there were seven other LeT members already on board, the Indian dossier states. The four crew members were later killed. Solanki took on the 10 passengers carrying huge backpacks full of weapons and dried fruit and then navigated the boat about 550 nautical miles (1,020 km) to Mumbai, until the trawler stopped at a point just 4 nautical miles (7.5 km) from the city.

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When night fell, Khan, the leader of the group and Qasab's partner, placed a call to his handler in Pakistan, the dossier from India states. Khan was directed to kill Solanki. Qasab and the rest of the group abandoned the Kuber and boarded an inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor. It took them only an hour to reach shore, and the murdered captain's body was discovered much later, after the attacks had begun.

Killing the Commuters
When Qasab landed, he found himself in a place not so very different from his home village of Faridkot. The jetty at Budhwar Park, where the dinghy pulled in, is the domain of fishermen who struggle to make a living. A few challenged Qasab and his partners when they landed, but the rest were busy watching a cricket match. The strangers strode past them to the main road, and Qasab and Khan hailed a taxi, reaching VT, Mumbai's main railway station, at about 9:20 p.m. (See more about terrorism.)

Qasab does not explain why VT was chosen as his first target, but it looks like the kind of grand, imposing building that represents the power and vitality of Mumbai. More than 3.5 million people pass through the station every day. But the 58 people who were killed in the attack on VT, which injured an additional 104, were a world away from the wealthy élite at the Taj and Oberoi hotels or the foreign visitors killed at the Leopold Café and the Nariman House Jewish center. They were office clerks commuting back to the suburbs and migrant laborers waiting for trains to their villages. Those who died included Chandulal Thandel, a bookseller closing his stall in the station for the night, and a police inspector, Shashank Shinde, who came by almost every day to buy a magazine from him.

Qasab seems to have thought little about who his victims would be; there was no singling out of foreigners as at the Taj and Oberoi. "We went inside the railway station threatening the commuters and randomly firing at them," he says in his statement. Qasab and Khan left after less than an hour, using the footbridge made famous by Slumdog Millionaire — the perch from which, in the film, Jamal looks for Latika. Qasab's only instructions were to find a building with a rooftop where they could take hostages and attract the media. They headed west out of the station, and nearby, Qasab spotted their next target, a pink seven-story building.

Dr. Sushil Sonawane was on duty on the second floor that night at Cama and Albless Hospital, and he recalls hearing the first shots at about 10:15. The building Qasab and Khan had chosen was an unlikely source of hostages — a public hospital for poor women and children, funded by a wealthy Mumbai family. The second floor was the neonatal intensive-care unit, and one of the eight people killed at the hospital was a relative visiting the maternity ward. Sonawane said he and the other doctors locked the doors of the unit and tried to keep everyone quiet as the grenades went off, causing the entire building to vibrate. "We put the babies on the breasts of the mothers to stop the crying," he said. Five police officers were killed in an intense exchange of fire, along with two ward clerks.

Having failed to find any hostages, Qasab and Khan left the same way they had come and met a police vehicle carrying three top officials, including the chief of the state's antiterrorism squad. "One police officer got down from the said vehicle and started firing at us," Qasab says in his statement. "One bullet hit my hand and my AK-47 dropped down. I bent to pick it up when the second bullet hit me on the same hand." But his partner managed to shoot and kill all three of the senior officers. Khan pulled out the bodies and drove away.

By now, the other gunmen had begun the siege of Mumbai, terrorizing the occupants of the Taj, the Oberoi and Nariman House. Qasab and Khan drove almost aimlessly through the streets. They ditched the police car, which had a flat tire, and took a white Skoda, ejecting three women without hurting them. Veering toward the sea, they bypassed the Oberoi on Marine Drive before being stopped by a barricade the police had set up ahead of them at the Girgaon Chaupati intersection.

Interviews with three of the police officers who were there reveal the last moments of Qasab's mission. Khan tried to make a U-turn but bumped into a concrete median. The car stopped, and the officers ran toward it. Khan started shooting from the driver's seat and was killed by police fire. Qasab first put up his hands as if to surrender, but when police officers opened the car door, he leaped out and dropped with his back to the ground, guns blazing. An unarmed assistant subinspector, Tukaram Ombale, grabbed the barrel of Qasab's AK-47 and was killed. Police then beat Qasab with their lathi sticks until he was unconscious. One officer remembers that Qasab looked different from Khan, the driver of the car. "The driver looked like an angry man," the police officer said. "The other one looks normal."

Back to the Village
Being beaten senseless by the police was not the exit Qasab had trained for. Instead of standing out from the thousands of other young men from villages like Faridkot, he was treated like a common criminal. The standoff between India and Pakistan, meanwhile, has escalated beyond him. The Indian government's dossier of evidence builds on Qasab's statement with details of the GPS coordinates and satellite-phone data retrieved from the scene of the attacks. But it does so not to strengthen the Mumbai Crime Branch's case against Qasab but to prove to the world that it was Pakistan and LeT that created him. "The evidence gathered so far unmistakably points to the territory of Pakistan as a source of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai," the dossier concludes. The ordinary things that Qasab and the others left behind on the boat — a matchbox, detergent powder, Touchme shaving cream and a bottle of Mountain Dew — are all included as exhibits, their MADE IN PAKISTAN labels presented as damning evidence.

So, too, is Qasab's story. He may have been no more than a small player. But in the places he came from and passed through and the sights, sounds and messages that he experienced, he is part of a much bigger tale, a violent drama that has rumbled over much of the subcontinent. The role has done him no good. Qasab may have escaped Faridkot and Rawalpindi. But he's no closer to the other side of the fence than when he started.
Time