In FrontPage this morning I sum up what we know so far about yesterday’s bombings in Mumbai:
Coordinated bombings in Mumbai, India murdered twenty-one people and wounded well over 100 Wednesday; Indian authorities suspect that Islamic jihadists have struck Mumbai once again. “We infer that this was a coordinated attack by terrorists,” said Indian home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, and other Indian officials reportedly believe that the Indian Mujahideen, which has close ties to the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible.
The Stratfor Global Intelligence service agreed:
This marks the first major attack in India since the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Though the magnitude of these explosions has yet to be determined, this attack does not appear to be as sophisticated as the 2008 attacks, which involved an assault team consisting of a number of militants that coordinated 10 shooting and bombing attacks across the city. The July 13 attack, by contrast, appears to have not involved suicide attackers but consisted of explosives placed in a taxi, a meter box and locations where they could be remotely detonated. This tactic is much more in line with those used by more amateurish groups, such [as] the Indian Mujahideen, who have targeted crowded urban areas before.
Some speculate that the synchronized explosions were a birthday gift for Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, the only surviving jihad mass-murderer from the November 2008 attack in Mumbai. In any case, there is no doubt that they were planted in busy areas so as to ensure the maximum number of casualties. That in itself may have been Lashkar-e-Taiba’s handiwork: since the Indian Mujahideen’s expert bomb makers are all in prison, authorities are investigating the possibility that the Pakistani jihad group helped construct the bombs used in Wednesday”s attacks. The first explosion went off at 6:54PM at the Jhaveri Bazaar, Mumbai’s famous jewelry market. The second hit at 6:55PM in the Opera House district, Mumbai’s business center, in a building that houses many jewelry firms. Ten minutes later, yet another bomb went off in Dadar, a populous area in central Mumbai.
Mumbai is India’s financial center, which is undoubtedly why it keeps on being the target of jihad attacks. Just as with the attacks on the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, jihadists want to strike at the financial might of Infidel states, ultimately weakening them enough that societal upheaval ensues, and Sharia becomes that much easier to impose.
