Since when did we stop calling it ‘Bombay’ anyway?
This whole thing blows. None of it makes sense.
In 96, when it got renamed. So, over a decade ago.
Damn, beaten.
It’s a little early to start throwign stones at the Indian security apparatus. I can’t imagine America would have done much better with this sort of attack. Chaos, multiple hostage situations all over town, the need to bring in military and coordinate them with police, it was a mess.
It’s actually been Mumbai to most of the natives for a couple of hundred years now. Mumbai has always been the preferred Marathi pronunciation of the city’s name and Marathi is the official language of the state of Maharashtra.
Also, one of the first targets when the terrorists landed was the area police station (which is why losses among police leadership were so heavy) which threw the response into even more chaos.
Incredibly, this was all apparently done by 10 people. Also, the reports of targeting Westerners for hostage-taking was mistaken - the gunmen killed anyone they could without regard for nationality (although targeting the local Jewish center was surely not coincidental) and the Indian army are finding bodies where they expected to find hostages, most of whom died the first day of the attack. Apparently the gunmen called hotel rooms, and when people picked up, the gunmen went to the room, beat down the door, and killed anyone inside. Chilling is an insufficient word to use.
I’m not sure the estimate of ten will hold. The New York Times quoted a witness in the harbor seeing ten men disembarking from a rubber boat but the author also suggest other attackers arrived at other points in the harbor and that some were prepositioned in hotels through the district.
The reporting still seems very confused.
This whole incident makes a pretty good argument for the right to arms.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/article14086308.ece
It is the photograph that has dominated the world’s front pages, casting an astonishing light on the fresh-faced killers who brought terror to the heart of India’s most vibrant city. Now it can be revealed how the astonishing picture came to be taken by a newspaper photographer who hid inside a train carriage as gunfire erupted all around him.
Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor at the Mumbai Mirror, whose offices are just opposite the city’s Chhatrapati Shivaji station, heard the gunfire erupt and ran towards the terminus. “I ran into the first carriage of one of the trains on the platform to try and get a shot but couldn’t get a good angle, so I moved to the second carriage and waited for the gunmen to walk by,” he said. “They were shooting from waist height and fired at anything that moved. I briefly had time to take a couple of frames using a telephoto lens. I think they saw me taking photographs but theydidn’t seem to care.”
The gunmen were terrifyingly professional, making sure at least one of them was able to fire their rifle while the other reloaded. By the time he managed to capture the killer on camera, Mr D’Souza had already seen two gunmen calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen, many of whom, he said, were armed but did not fire back. “I first saw the gunmen outside the station,” Mr D’Souza said. "With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles.
“Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop,” he recalled. “The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down.”
But what angered Mr D’Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” he said. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.”
As the gunmen fired at policemen taking cover across the street, Mr D’Souza realised a train was pulling into the station unaware of the horror within. “I couldn’t believe it. We rushed to the platform and told everyone to head towards the back of the station. Those who were older and couldn’t run, we told them to stay put.”
The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D’Souza added: “I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera.”
Useless cops.
I love the school of thought that suggests that problems with police are a good reason to arm the populace to the teeth instead of, say, fixing the problems with the police.
No, it doesn’t. “Because armed terrorists might storm our city” isn’t a very good argument for lifting gun control. You’re better off going with that old paranoid NRA fantasy of a people having to rise up and overthrow their oppressive governments. At least there’s a stronger Constitutional basis for that old canard.
I’m sure armed untrained civilians would have been much more effective…
-Tom
P.S. Jeebus, that’s a chilling photograph.
Well, you’d have to get training to use a gun, like most people who own weapons in Israel. Otherwise what good is it?
The cops in India (excepting the commandos and army) aren’t exactly well trained. Most of them are equipped with WWI-era bolt-action rifles. This isn’t to say that a squad of well trained police officers with bolt-action rifles wouldn’t do any damage against a couple of goons wielding AK47s, but those police officers were pretty useless in general. They couldn’t even cordon off the hotels from the press which took pictures of the dead and the gore-splattered floors of the lobbies. India’s media is busy praising them as if they did a good job, but they really have no good excuse.
Mumbai seems to suffer terrorist attacks with almost the same regularity as Israel does, so an armed populace doesn’t really seem like such a bad idea, especially if the police are too inept to keep the peace. Such an attack could’ve never have happened in New York, London or Singapore (and I’m not talking about bombs. I’m talking about 10 AK47-wielding guys shooting people in broad daylight with little to no police response).
There’s a story right now that’s making the rounds about how 5 South African military contractors who witnessed the shootings in the hotel restaurant that they were in managed to rescue 150 unarmed civilians. They too were unarmed and even carried the old and the infirm down many flights of stairs to safety.
The guy in that photograph surrendered, by the way. He’s currently in custody.
For massive casualty events like this the primary key is proximity. If you have an armed police man within 3 blocks you are much more likely to shut down the situation and prevent further casualties.
They didn’t shut down squat, though. The terrorists (all 10 of them) managed to take hostages (all of whom are dead, sadly) at a hospital and 2 hotels. They also killed many people at the train station and stores and restaurants nearby while en route.
Hell, the terrorists even hijacked a police vehicle and shot at random civilians and journalists.
There it is again. That same idea that gun nuts drag out again and again. It seems to be predicated on the assumption that police will never be able to protect the populace regardless of how much training they are given but individual citizens with little or no training will somehow always play hero.
Frankly it doesn’t make a bit of sense to me.
Sol, I was assuming – and guess what happens when I assume? – that you were angling towards some sort of gun nut post (hi Anti-Bunny!). Here in the US, many of us have this cowboy sense of entitlement that divorces the right to bear arms from responsibility or even regulation. Also, you mentioned the “right to bear arms” and I immediately escalated to “lifting gun control”, so my bad for essentially talking past you.
However, I’m still not convinced that armed civilians would have made much of a difference in Mumbai. Out of curiosity, how often do armed civilians in Israel foil terrorist attacks? I don’t know the answer.
-TomWhen you think of cops in India you shouldn’t be thinking of the highly trained police forces you hear about in New York, London or Hong Kong. These guys can’t even be counted on solving the previous terrorist attacks whose masterminds are still at large, and they’ve refused to let Interpol take point on the investigations because they’re afraid of losing face.
After what’s happened here, how can anyone place their faith in India’s police force, unless the government actually decides to get off its ass and do something about all the corruption that goes on and create a proper, highly-trained police force for the 21st century?
So in a nutshell, yes, the police can’t protect the populace in Mumbai. Many of them are even simply armed thugs who extort civilians and get away with it. If it were an option, I think that a lot of people would prefer to see the safety of Mumbai handled by the Mafia instead of what they’ve got.
Oh, good lord. Okay, that’s it, you’re going back into the gun nut pigeonhole. :)
-Tom
Maybe I’m not tracking you here Sol. Are you suggesting that Mumbai has some long running problems with inept police and this was just the last straw, or are you criticizing them based solely on their inability to handle this extraordinary situation?
It’s sure done the U.S. a world of good.
Oh no, that would be bad. I don’t think India’s really ready for the complete deregulation of personal firearms. There might be a lot more terrorist incidents if everyone and anyone could get their hands on a weapon. It’d really need to be an extremely regulated process with registrations, safety training and so forth. There would definitely have to be some oversight. India’s corruption doesn’t really help with that sort of thing.
However, I’m still not convinced that armed civilians would have made much of a difference in Mumbai. Out of curiosity, how often do armed civilians in Israel foil terrorist attacks? I don’t know the answer.
-Tom
It’s probably often enough that you don’t hear of Palestinian terrorists gunning down dozens of folks in the streets. As a large number of the citizenry is armed, it wouldn’t take long for an armed civilian to deal with the threat. But likewise, I don’t know.