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ShareMumbai: As the Mumbai Police prepare to file a 5,000-page charge-sheet against Mohammed Ajmal Amir aka Kasab and three others on Wednesday, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has given details of how American and British agencies helped Indian investigators during and after the carnage in November to collect evidence and trace the masterminds.
FBI director Robert Mueller, while speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC, on Monday, said Indian authorities gave the FBI and other international agencies unprecedented access to evidence and intelligence. FBI agents extracted "fingerprints even from the improvised explosive devices", he said.
According to the FBI website, Mueller said agents in Delhi and Islamabad collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US state department, British spy agency MI-6, and New Scotland Yard.
Mueller said FBI agents "conducted more than 60 interviews, including (that of) the lone surviving attacker (Ajmal)".
FBI director Robert Mueller, while speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC, on Monday, said the FBI and British agencies helped Indian investigators trace the 26/11 masterminds.
He said the agents "recovered data from damaged cell phones, in one case by literally wiring a smashed phone back together".
Mueller praised FBI special agent Steve Merril, a legal attaché in the bureau's New Delhi office. "Steve was taking a day off and was on his way to Jodhpur to play cricket on the US embassy team in the maharaja's annual tournament" when he heard of the Mumbai strikes, Mueller said. "All he had were the clothes on his back, his BlackBerry, and his cricket gear."
He said Merril helped police and commandos rescue Americans trapped inside the Taj hotel and set up lines of communication with the FBI and other global intelligence agencies.
He said the agents "collected, analysed, and disseminated intelligence" to their "partners at home and abroad" to "ensure that if a second wave of attacks was in the offing, we possessed the intelligence to stop it".
He said the 26/11 attacks "remind us that terrorists with large agendas and little money can use rudimentary weapons to maximise their impact". The attack also "raised the question" of whether a similar attack could happen in a US city, Mueller said.
The FBI director said the "primary threat" to the US continues to come from the "tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan".
Media helped terrorists track police
FBI director Robert Mueller said in his speech on Monday that the electronic media inadvertently helped the terrorists to monitor the movements of police and evade arrest. Mueller said that as news of the attack spread across the global media, the attackers "used the same technology, not only to monitor the movements of the police and rescue teams and to evade capture, but to communicate with their leaders who were some distance away".
