May 15, 2008 ☼ India ☼ Islamists ☼ Jaipur ☼ jihadis ☼ Pakistan ☼ Rajasthan ☼ Security ☼ terrorism
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
The ‘Indian Mujahideen’ have sent an email, from a UK domain, claiming responsibility for carrying out the attacks in Jaipur. They have provided enough details, including the chassis number of one bicycle and video clips of others, that suggest that it’s not a hoax.
So what else do they have to say?
“India should stop supporting the US in the international arena,”and if you do continue then get ready to face more attacks at other important tourist places…
Jaipur has been chosen to blow up your tourism structure….
…this is a clear warning to you (the US and the UK)…Don’t send your people to India and if you do so then you people will be welcomed by our suicide attackers.” [IE]First, the principal demand is too general to be credible. It appears more like a fashionable, polemical justification of the attacks rather than an attempt to put up political demands.
Second, a group that calls itself the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ refers to India’s ‘tourism structure’ in the second person. Freudian slip?
Third, the location and timing of the bombings clearly were meant to kill local people (although a certain famous Australian hanging out in hundreds of miles away in Goa was duly scared). So trying to warn the United States and Britain by killing Indians is a rather indirect way of going about it, especially because al-Qaeda related outfits have preferred more direct methods.
The email message may well have come from the real perpetrators but is almost certainly designed to mislead public opinion. Those with the capacity to carry out coordinated bombings should also be smart enough to know that such attacks can’t imaginably cause broad changes in foreign policy. The claim that this was an attack on the tourism industry would have been more credible if tourists or foreigners were the principal targets. In all likelihood, therefore, the content of this email is a red herring.
The email came out of the same cybercafe outside New Delhi that was used to claim responsibility for the earlier attacks on Varanasi. That shows a level of brazenness. In November 2007, the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ claimed that they were retaliating against the injustice to Muslims in India, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the Gujarat riots; and also because lawyers beat up the suspects. The ‘Indian Mujahideen’, if it is to be taken at its word, appears to be a rather confused organisation.
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