We're told to take hostages & make demands, Ajmal tells police

MUMBAI: The terrorists, who carried out the dastardly attack here, had been instructed by their masters in Pakistan to take hostages and make demands through the media, according to the lone surviving suspect Mohammad Ajmal Amir.

Ajmal's statement recorded by Mumbai police gives details of the intensive training given to 10 terrorists who killed 183 people when they struck this metropolis on the evening of November 26. Actually 32 young men were trained initially out of which five teams of two each were dispatched for Mumbai from Karachi three days earlier via sea.

According to police sources, Ajmal has stated that originally they were instructed to carry out firing at rush hours in the morning between 7 and 11 am and the same hours in the evening.

The plan was to kidnap some persons and take them to the roof of some nearby building, the 21-year-old resident of Faridkot village in Pakistan's Punjab province has said.

From there, the terrorists were to contact "chacha" (uncle), their trainer whose full name is Zaqi-Ur-Rahman 'chacha'.

The 'chacha' is obviously Zaki-Ur-Rahman Lakhvi, chief of operations of Lashkar-e Toiba (LeT), one of the four persons declared terrorists last week by the UN Security Council, which had also designated Jamaat-ud Dawa (JuD) and two of its sister organisations, Al-Rashid Trust and Al-Akhtar Trust, as terrorist groups.

"After that chacha would give the telephone or mobile numbers of the electronic media. We were then to contact the media persons on the same phone," Ajmal said.