26/11 Mumbai Attacks: Ten Gunmen, Sixty Hours, and the Masterminds India Still Can’t Reach

Around nine o’clock on the night of Wednesday 26 November 2008, an inflatable dinghy pulled up at Badhwar Park, a fishermen’s colony in Cuffe Parade at the southern tip of Mumbai. Ten young men climbed out with heavy backpacks and split into pairs.

Each of them, the courts later found, carried an AK rifle with 240 rounds, eight grenades, a pistol, a GPS set and a bomb of about 8 kg of RDX packed in a tiffin box. Nobody stopped them.

Within an hour they would be shooting at people in a railway station, a café and two of India’s most famous hotels. By the time it was over, 166 people were dead, 238 were injured, and the date 26/11 had become, for India, what 9/11 is for America.

This is the full story: the sea voyage, the sixty hours, the one gunman caught alive, the trial that hanged him, the warnings that were missed, and the masterminds who are still out of India’s reach.

The attack was planned in Pakistan, and planned carefully. According to Kasab’s confession, which the Supreme Court accepted as voluntary, the men were picked and trained by Lashkar-e-Taiba. He named the group’s founder Hafiz Saeed and its operations commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi as the men in charge.

Training ran for most of 2008: at the group’s base in Muridke, at camps near Mansehra and Muzaffarabad for weapons, grenades, GPS and satellite phones, and finally marine training in Karachi.

The targets had been scouted for two years. David Coleman Headley, an American born Daood Gilani, changed his name in 2006 so he could travel without drawing attention. Between 2006 and 2008 he made five trips to Mumbai, filming the Taj and other sites and checking a landing spot. His cover was a Mumbai office of First World Immigration, a Chicago firm run by his friend Tahawwur Rana.

The conspiracy behind the crime was in Pakistan.

The ten men left Karachi on 22 November on a boat called the Al-Hussaini. The next day, at sea, they took over an Indian fishing trawler, the Kuber, after a staged distress call. Four of its crew were killed.

They kept the navigator, Amarchand Solanki, alive to steer them to Mumbai. On 26 November, within sight of the city, Kasab cut his throat. The ten men moved into the dinghy and headed for the shore, running about an hour and a half behind their plan.

The gunmen split up across south Mumbai. Two went to the Oberoi-Trident hotel. Two went to Nariman House, a Jewish centre run by a young rabbi and his wife. Four went to the Taj Mahal Palace. Two, Kasab and his leader Ismail Khan, went to one of the busiest railway stations in India.

• Leopold Cafe, the backpackers’ café in Colaba: 11 killed in a few minutes of firing.
• CST station (VT): Kasab and Ismail fired into the crowded main hall. The Supreme Court counts 52 dead here; many reports say 58. It was the deadliest single site.
• Cama hospital: the pair moved on to a women’s and children’s hospital. A nurse, Anjali Kulthe, hid patients in a pantry and kept them there until about 4 am.
• Taxi bombs: bombs left in two taxis blew up at Mazgaon and Vile Parle, killing five people between them.
• The Taj, the Oberoi and Nariman House: gunmen took over all three, shooting guests and staff and taking hostages.

Near Cama hospital, in a narrow lane by Rang Bhavan, the gunmen opened fire on a police Qualis. Inside were three of Mumbai’s best-known officers: anti-terror chief Hemant Karkare, Additional Commissioner Ashok Kamte and encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar. All three were killed, along with three constables. One constable in the back, Arun Jadhav, played dead under the bodies of his colleagues. He survived, and later told the court what he saw.

The gunmen dumped the bodies, took the police vehicle, and later took a Skoda car near Nariman Point.

Around half past midnight, police set up a roadblock at Girgaum Chowpatty, on Marine Drive. When the Skoda arrived, there was a shoot-out. Ismail Khan was killed.

Assistant Sub-Inspector Tukaram Omble, armed only with a lathi, grabbed the barrel of Kasab’s rifle and held on while Kasab fired into him. Omble died. But because he held that gun, his colleagues were able to take Kasab alive.

That one act changed everything that followed. A captured gunman meant a confession, a trial, a name, a village in Pakistan, and proof that no denial could easily wash away. Omble was awarded the Ashok Chakra, India’s highest peacetime gallantry award, after his death.

Because Omble held on to that rifle, India had a living attacker to put on trial, and the world had proof of where the attack came from.

At the Taj, fire broke out under the famous central dome soon after 1 am. Pictures of the burning hotel went around the world.

The National Security Guard, India’s elite counter-terror force, flew in from Delhi. Its plane left around 3 am and landed about two hours later, and the commandos went in later that morning. The operation was called Black Tornado. Critics have argued ever since about why it took so long.

Nariman House. On the morning of 28 November, commandos slid down ropes from a helicopter onto the roof. Havildar Gajender Singh Bisht was killed in the assault. By evening both gunmen were dead, but so were the hostages inside, among them Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. Their two-year-old son, Moshe, survived, carried out by his nanny, Sandra Samuel.

The Oberoi. The siege there ended on the afternoon of 28 November, with both gunmen killed and more than a hundred people rescued.

The Taj. It went on longest. Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan of the NSG was killed inside while getting an injured commando out. The general manager, Karambir Singh Kang, lost his wife and two sons in the fire, and stayed at his post. The last gunman was killed on the morning of 29 November.

Through all of it, the gunmen were not alone. They were taking orders by phone.

Indian intelligence recorded 12 hours and 33 minutes of calls between the gunmen inside the Taj, the Oberoi and Nariman House and handlers far away. The calls ran through an internet phone number from a New Jersey company, bought under a false name: ‘Kharak Singh’.

The recordings, quoted in the Supreme Court judgment, are chilling. The handlers passed on what Indian TV channels were reporting, including a report that a minister was trapped in the Taj. They told the gunmen to set fires. They told them to kill hostages if security forces closed in.

In other words, the people running the attack were watching it live on Indian television, and using what they saw.

Kasab was taken to hospital and gave his name. By the next afternoon his statement had led police to the abandoned trawler Kuber. He later confessed before a magistrate.

His trial, before Special Judge M.L. Tahaliyani with Ujjwal Nikam prosecuting, moved quickly by Indian standards. He faced 86 charges. In July 2009 he suddenly pleaded guilty, then took it back in December.

On 3 May 2010 he was convicted, and on 6 May he was sentenced to death. Two Indian men accused of helping with maps, Fahim Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed, were acquitted. The Bombay High Court upheld the death sentence in February 2011.

On 29 August 2012, the Supreme Court upheld it too. The judges wrote that a life sentence was ‘unquestionably foreclosed’ by the scale of the crime. The President rejected his mercy plea on 5 November 2012.

Kasab was hanged at 7.30 am on 21 November 2012 in Yerwada jail in Pune, in a secret operation code-named ‘Operation X’. He was buried inside the jail. Divya Salaskar, daughter of the killed officer, said she had waited four years for that day.

At first, Pakistan denied that the gunmen came from Pakistan at all. Then the evidence piled up. India handed over a dossier on 5 January 2009 with Kasab’s interrogation, the phone links and data from the gunmen’s GPS sets and satellite phones.

Journalists found Kasab’s home village, Faridkot in Pakistan’s Okara district. On 7 January 2009, a Pakistani minister confirmed to Dawn that he was Pakistani. The country’s national security adviser was sacked for saying so first. In February 2009, interior minister Rehman Malik admitted that part of the plot had been hatched in Pakistan.

Some part of the conspiracy has taken place in Pakistan.

Pakistan charged seven men, including Lakhvi, in 2009. But that trial has never reached a verdict. Lakhvi got bail in December 2014 and walked free in 2015. He was jailed again in 2021, for terror financing, not for 26/11. Hafiz Saeed and Sajid Mir are also in Pakistani prisons on terror-financing convictions, according to a UN panel and news reports, while India’s requests to hand Saeed over have been refused.

An attack this big, with this many failures around it, was always going to breed theories. Some are wrong, some are unproven, and some are simply true.

The public mood turned from shock to fury, much of it aimed at politicians. On 3 December 2008, thousands gathered at the Gateway of India, opposite the still-smoking Taj, with placards reading ‘enough is enough’. Candlelight vigils spread across the country.

Heads rolled. Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil resigned on 30 November, and P. Chidambaram took over. Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh resigned after he toured the damaged Taj with his actor son and a film director. His deputy, R.R. Patil, went too, after saying that ‘small incidents’ happen in big cities.

Around the world, the UN Security Council condemned the attacks. Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, called them an attack on all of us, not just India.

26/11 rewired India’s security system. Within weeks, Parliament created the National Investigation Agency and tightened the anti-terror law, UAPA. The NSG opened regional hubs so commandos would never again have to fly in from Delhi, and Maharashtra set up its own commando unit, Force One. The Navy was given overall charge of coastal security.

The Taj reopened its tower wing on 21 December 2008, less than a month later, and the restored palace wing in August 2010. Moshe Holtzberg, the toddler carried out of Nariman House, came back to visit in 2018 and celebrated his bar mitzvah in Israel in 2019.

In the US, David Headley pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 35 years in January 2013. He also turned approver in the Mumbai case and gave evidence by video in 2016.

Tahawwur Rana, his friend, was acquitted of the Mumbai charges by a Chicago jury in 2011 but convicted over a plot against a Danish newspaper and of supporting Lashkar. After a long fight, the US extradited him to India on 10 April 2025. He is held in Tihar jail, and is presumed innocent of the Indian charges. On 8 October 2026, a special NIA court in Delhi listed arguments on the charges from 16 November 2026.

In August 2026, Maharashtra took a step India had never taken before in a terror case. Under a new provision of the criminal procedure law, it asked a Mumbai court to try six Pakistani accused, including Hafiz Saeed, Lakhvi and Sajid Mir, in their absence. Notices were to be served through Interpol, followed by a 90-day wait. As of this writing we found no report that the trial had formally begun.

Eighteen years on, the only 26/11 attacker to face an Indian court is dead. The men accused of sending him have never faced one.

26/11 has been retold many times: Ram Gopal Varma’s The Attacks of 26/11 (2013) with Nana Patekar; Hotel Mumbai (2019) with Dev Patel, set inside the Taj; Major (2022), with Adivi Sesh as Sandeep Unnikrishnan; the series Mumbai Diaries 26/11 (2021), set in a hospital; ZEE5’s State of Siege: 26/11 (2020); and the documentary Terror in Mumbai (2009), built around the intercepted calls.

26/11 is remembered for its villains, but the story turns on ordinary people who did extraordinary things. A constable with a lathi grabbed a rifle. A nurse barricaded a pantry. A nanny ran down a staircase with a two-year-old. A hotel manager kept working while his family died upstairs.

It is also a story of failure: warnings that were not acted on, a police response that was confused at the top, commandos stuck waiting, and TV channels that, in their hunger for ratings, handed the enemy a live feed.

India got its verdict on the one man it caught. It has never got one on the men who planned it. Until it does, the file on 26/11 is not really closed.