Why is the mastermind of the 1993 Bombay blasts still at large? The world’s foremost security experts do a deep dive for News9 Plus to unravel the mystery.
News9 Plus quizzes top Indian and US intelligence and foreign service officials along-side influential anti-terror voices to decode the 1993 bombings, which were India’s first brush with catastrophic terrorism and precursor to 2008 26/11 attacks. The net take-away being that India must bring out a white paper on Pakistan’s Jehadi General and take it to major world forums for calling out Pakistan’s bluff and exposing the terror state.
Who was the mastermind who planned the 1993 terror attacks?
In a World Exclusive, News9 Plus reveals for the first time the face behind the Mumbai 1993 attacks.
Ever since its inception, News9 Plus, the world’s first news OTT, has kept a sharp eye on India’s internal security challenges as well as external threats.
For this story, News9 Plus has done a deep dive into the conspiracy behind the 1993 blasts by getting leading domain experts as talking heads. These include former R&AW Chief Vikram Sood, former US Defence Intelligence Agency official & ISI book author Professor Owen L Sirrs; former Mumbai Police Commissioner MN Singh; former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan G Parthasarathy and Dr Prem Mahadevan, Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies in Zurich, Switzerland.
Thirty years ago, on March 12th, 1993, a dozen bomb explosions ripped Bombay apart. These explosions killed 257 Mumbaikars and injured over 1,400. The attacks were carried out by Dawood Ibrahim, and his organised crime syndicate.
After the bombings, the foot soldiers who carried out the attacks were swiftly rounded up while the bosses fled the country.
The name of Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, is written in every charge sheet. Yet the central government did neither investigate the ISI’s grievous culpability in the attacks nor pursue action against its officials or come out with a white paper on the attacks. These military-style attacks on Mumbai were executed by so-called ‘non-state actors’, which allowed GHQ Rawalpindi to exercise ‘plausible deniability’.
“I don’t have any doubt in my mind that Lieutenant General Javed Nasir ordered the 1993 Mumbai bombings by the Dawood Ibrahim gang,” says Owen L. Sirrs, Adjunct Professor at the University of Montana, USA. Sirrs, a former Defence Intelligence Agency official and author of the well-regarded 2017 book Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Talking Points: Covert Action and Internal Operations. Lt Gen Nasir was the Director General of the ISI. “I think this operation was done with the knowledge of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at the time, because he was handpicked by Sharif as his director general of ISI. He wouldn’t have done that with an individual who would go rogue,” he adds.
Calling it India’s first brush with catastrophic terrorism, Vikram Sood, former head of the Research and Analysis Wing, says the 1993 Bombay blasts took everybody by surprise. “The Mumbai serial blasts of 1993 were India’s first experience of catastrophic terrorism. We had not seen something like it before. It was meant to be dramatic. It was meant to prove a point. There was a clear Pakistani fingerprint, but everybody was caught by surprise. This is the honest truth.”
Former Mumbai Police Commissioner MN Singh told News9 Plus that the Pakistani hand is obvious.
“We learned from the people we arrested that they had been trained in Pakistan; they went from Mumbai to Dubai and from there took a Pakistan International Airlines to Islamabad. They were trained by people from the Pakistan Army. They supplied weapons. They provided training. They provided shelter. None of them was checked when they landed in Islamabad. They passed immigration and security without being stopped. When the ISI is involved, you don’t need a passport.
Dr Prem Mahadevan, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Security Studies in Zurich, Switzerland calls the attack an act of war against the Indian State. “This was meant to be part of a larger campaign of urban terror carried out through India – an act of war. People have talked about 26/11 as an act of war. This is essentially part of a long-standing covert campaign to destabilise India,” says Mahadevan. “General Nasir was considered to be an activist general in terms of his ideological leanings. His name came up in connection with the support of jihadism in Central Asia. He was linked to the LTTE. He was also linked to the insurgency in Myanmar. This is not something that an intelligence chief would do unless he had orders from above.”
So frustrated was Washington by Nasir’s conduct that Christina B. Rocca, assistant secretary of state for South Asia recommended in 1992 that Pakistan be added to the control list of ‘suspected state sponsors of terrorism’.
Nasir was eventually sacked in May 1993 but is still at large, three decades after the attack. In the early 1990s he supplied Bosnian Muslims with assault rifles and anti-tank weapons
after violating a UN arms embargo. In 2011 the Pakistan government refused a summons from the International Tribunal of the Hague to extradite him in that case.
Now 87, he is a preacher with the Tablighi Jamat, an organisation he has been associated with since 1986. Thirty years after 1993, what can India do to bring somebody like Nasir to book? “He is somebody who espouses a radical pan-Islamic viewpoint. I’m a strong proponent of something called the white paper. You make a case and you broadcast that case using your white paper as the foundation in different fora. In your diplomatic engagements bilaterally with the United States. Pick any number of countries and make this part of your emphasis on Pakistani State-sponsored terror,” is the advice from Owen L. Sirrs. “And you then use that white paper and take it to the United Nations,” he recommends.
‘The Jihadi General’ is a compelling new season of two webisodes, recently released on News9 Plus.
EP1: A Dozen Bombings
EP2: The Man Who Bombed Bombay
News9 Plus is the world’s first news OTT in a video magazine format. A new offering from TV9 Network – India’s number one news network – News9 Plus is poised to disrupt the cluttered English news market where traditional ad-driven revenue models make way for a subscription-only business. News9 Plus may be experienced by downloading the app on Android and iOS devices.
To watch the episodes, download the News9Plus app here
