News9 Plus reveals the face behind the Mumbai 1993 attacks

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 the…

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