{"id":1700,"date":"2008-12-02T15:39:19","date_gmt":"2008-12-02T14:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2008\/12\/02\/bombay_attacks_may_have_been_by_mafia"},"modified":"2025-10-09T17:51:42","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T16:51:42","slug":"bombay_attacks_may_have_been_by_mafia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2008\/12\/02\/bombay_attacks_may_have_been_by_mafia","title":{"rendered":"Bombay attacks may have been by Mafia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Misha Glenny, a noted author of books on the underworld, suggests that the Bombay-Karachi mafia known as "D-Company" may have been involved in last week's attacks<\/a>, as they were in earlier bombings. The "kingpin" is a guy called Dawood Ibrahim, who controls a syndicate based out of Karachi, who organised the 1993 bombings in response to communal riots the year before, which killed 900 people, two thirds of them Muslims, and a number of his associates were killed or had property damaged. Then, he bribed Indian port officials; the same looks to be the case here:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nThe Mumbai attacks were not about global jihad. The attacks on foreign tourists at the Taj and the Oberoi, and on the Lubavitch centre, were designed to secure maximum publicity – a strategy that worked splendidly. Yet the roots of this nightmarish event are to be found elsewhere: in the deterioration in relations between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai and India since the late 1980s, and in regional relations between India and Pakistan.
\nThe operational key to the Mumbai attacks, however, is almost certainly held by D-Company, the sprawling and hugely effective organised criminal syndicate that is steered from the Pakistani port city of Karachi by the most powerful figure in Mumbai's fabled underworld, Dawood Ibrahim. It is virtually impossible that Dawood was unaware of the preparation of the attack, given the D-Company's extensive intelligence network (which in several past instances has proved more effective than the Indian state's intelligence capacity).
\nIndia's security services have begun investigating Dawood's possible role in the attack because he controls most of the smuggling routes into India's great commercial centre. In 1993, he put his network at the disposal of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, to let it smuggle in huge amounts of the explosive RDX …
\nSasool Dock, where a dozen or so of the attackers landed, is one of the port areas under D-Company's control. In the 1993 attacks, Dawood was able to land the RDX at night because he corrupted police officials responsible for monitoring the coast in Mumbai and its environs. If Dawood's role in the recent attacks is confirmed, it is highly likely that officials will again have been paid to turn a blind eye.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, Melanie Phillips<\/a> is still singing from the "global jihad" hymn sheet, entirely predictably (she need not write columns anymore; her opinions are so predictable that a committee could write them on her behalf). She insists that an "obscure" Jewish centre was targeted "because hatred of Jews as Jews is fundamental to the Islamists' hatred of the west – and of Israel", and ends with this flourish:<\/p>\n

\nIf they can do this in Mumbai, they can do it in London or other British cities; the infrastructure of Islamist terror is more extensively developed in Britain, and the authorities more paralysed in the face of what they have allowed to grow in their midst, than anywhere else in the west.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, the fact that London doesn't a short boat ride from Karachi is a problem there, as is the fact that the UK has no well-organised Muslim criminal syndicates (a few drug dealers here and there, that's all), and because our officials are probably wealthier than those in India, and thus less easy to bribe. Silly cow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Misha Glenny, a noted author of books on the underworld, suggests that the Bombay-Karachi mafia known as "D-Company" may have been involved in last week's attacks, as they were in earlier bombings. The "kingpin"...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[34,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-melanie_phillips","category-terrorism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-rq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1700"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41721,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions\/41721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}