Man who planned and directed 26/11: Sajid Mir, whose designation as terrorist has been blocked by China

#WATCH | “…If we cannot get established terrorists who have been proscribed across global landscapes listed under security council architecture for pure geopolitical interest, then we do not really have the genuine political will needed to sincerely fight this challenge of… pic.twitter.com/mcbw3bV13W

— ANI (@ANI) June 21, 2023

Sajid Mir is the operations mastermind of the November 26, 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, in which 166 individuals, including six Americans and 20 other foreigners, were killed, and 308 injured. The US has offered a bounty of $ 5 million for him, and he is among the terrorists most wanted by India.

In June 2022, it was reported that Mir had been taken into custody in Pakistan, apparently as Islamabad tried to get off the “grey list” of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the international watchdog for terrorist financing.

So is Sajid Mir in prison now?

It is not known for sure. Mir was reported to have been jailed for 15 years by a Pakistani anti-terrorism court last year. But no details of the reported sentencing, or of the arrest that apparently preceded it, were made available.

Even if the sentencing did happen, it is unclear what it means — Pakistani anti-terrorism courts have earlier tried, convicted, and sentenced other Lashkar members, including its leader Hafiz Saeed.

In fact, until the 2022 reports, Pakistan had given the impression that Mir had died — but had failed to provide any proof.

Sources had told The Indian Express last year that New Delhi had been made aware of Mir’s arrest a couple of months before his jailing was first reported by Nikkei Asia. But Indian authorities had not been able to obtain an independent confirmation of the arrest, The Indian Express had reported at the time.

Why is Sajid Mir such a big deal?

Sajid Mir was the key figure in the 26/11 attacks, its chief planner, the handler of the scout who scoped out Mumbai for the Lashkar, and the man who led the control room in Pakistan as the attacks unfolded.

Mir was on the phone with the terrorists as they went about carrying out their mission at multiple sites; he instructed and advised them at every step, and scripted and directed the slaughter.

Sebastian Rotella, who led a journalistic investigation of the 26/11 attacks for the American nonprofit ProPublica, wrote that the Lashkar “had made Mir the project manager of its biggest strike ever, the crowning achievement of his (Mir’s) career as a holy warrior”.

In a two-part article, the first of which was titled ‘The Man Behind Mumbai’, published by ProPublica and The Washington Post in 2010, Rotella painted a detailed portrait of Mir, “whose global trail traces Lashkar’s evolution”.

Mir “has surfaced in investigations on four continents, his web reaching as far as suburban Virginia (in the US). Fleeting glimpses of him appear in case files and communications intercepts. A French court even convicted him in absentia in 2007”. However, Rotella wrote, “he remains free and dangerous, according to US and Indian officials.”

What is known of Mir’s background?

Indian investigators also identified Mir as Sajid Majid, and his year of birth as 1978. Rotella wrote that the terrorist could possibly be a few years older, and that Majid could either be his real name or an alias.

Mir was born in Lahore in a family that had a manufacturing business. When Mir was about 16 years old, he joined Lashkar, which Hafiz Saeed and Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Islamist who inspired Osama bin Laden, had founded in the late 1980s.

Mir was put in the Lashkar’s international operations wing, focussed on global jihad, and became close to the organisation’s military chief, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, Mir began grooming the foreign terrorists who came to Pakistan to fight the West, including a radical Frenchman named Willie Brigitte, and four men from Virginia, Rotella reported.

According to Brigitte’s testimony in France later, Mir, who was also known as Abu Bara, Uncle Bill, and Sajid Bill, was dark and wore a thick beard and a Makarov pistol on his hip. “He was in fact an important personage… He was a man of about 30, very cordial and pleasant, with whom I had a good relationship,” Brigitte testified, according to Rotella’s report.

According to Brigitte, it was clear that Mir was a part of the Pakistani Army. Investigators in several countries have reached the same conclusion. Rotella quoted Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a French counter-terrorism magistrate who investigated Mir, as saying he was “a high-ranking officer in the Pakistani Army and apparently also was in the ISI”.

In 2002 and 2003, Mir planned operations in the US and Australia, both of which were foiled. But in France, magistrate Bruguiere, relying on the confessions of Brigitte, “built a case that Mir was a kingpin leading terrorist operations on four continents”, Rotella reported.

Bruguiere was convinced that Mir was an officer in Pakistan’s army or ISI, and he issued an arrest warrant in October 2006. Pakistan did not respond to the notice circulated by Interpol and, in 2007, a court in Paris convicted Mir in absentia and sentenced him to 10 years in prison, Rotella reported.

How did Mir get involved in the Lashkar’s planning for the 26/11 attacks?

Around 2001, a Pakistani American heroin dealer named Daood Gilani, who was also an informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, arrived in Pakistan and joined a Lashkar training camp. Mir spotted and befriended him.

In 2005, Mir allegedly entered India along with a group of Pakistani cricket fans, apparently to scope out possible Lashkar operations. Later that year, Mir commissioned Daood Gilani to be the Lashkar’s lead scout for the Mumbai mission.

In preparation for his job, Daood Gilani changed his name to David Coleman Headley, and was given a large sum of money by a serving ISI officer who introduced himself to Headley as Major Iqbal. Mir and this Iqbal became Headley’s handlers as he set up base in Mumbai and went about scoping out the targets of the coming attack.

The 10 terrorists in the attack team left Karachi in the morning of November 22, 2008, hijacked a fishing trawler, and reached Mumbai in the evening of November 26. The attacks began around 9.30 pm, at the famous Cafe Leopold in Colaba.

From the control room in Pakistan, a group of handlers led by Mir directed the operations over phones, and watched TV as the attack unfolded. Mir dominated the conversations.

Rotella reported that he chided a terrorist who was distracted by the opulence of the Taj Mahal hotel, and demanded that he quickly start a big fire; instructed a terrorist at the Oberoi to “fight bravely” to reach heaven, while keeping his phone on in his pocket because “we like to know what’s going on”; and spoke directly to a hostage in Chabad House and later ordered her and the others’ execution.