New leads into the Mumbai terror attacks have revealed that the two bombs that went off at Vile Parle and Wadi Bandar were planted by slain terrorist Ismail Khan and his associate Mohammad Ajmal Amir Iman, who is in police custody.
ATS sources told rediff.com that this revelation was made by Mohammad Ajmal Amir Iman during his interrogation on Tuesday.
He says that the bombs (improvised explosive devices) were manufactured before they left Pakistan. Each terrorist carried IEDs and they had instructions to blow up specific places during their mission.
The ATS officials found IEDs near the Taj Mahal Hotel too.
Amir Iman, who is also known as Kasab, told his interrogators that the idea was to create as much chaos as possible apart and terrorising the entire city. He informed the ATS that the explosives were assembled by his associate, Ismail Khan, and he planted the bombs at two locations.
ATS sources say that they are not sure if the terrorists wanted to blow up Hotel Taj Mahal, but added that they wanted to cause the maximum possible damage.
Iman further revealed that they were instructed to return to Pakistan at any cost.
Otherwise, "our commanders promised to take care of our families and ordered that we should die fighting during the operation", he told the ATS officials.
Iman refused to divulge information on any local module and insisted that the entire operation was planned at Pakistan.
ATS officials suspect that Iman might not know anything about the local modules, as his bosses might not have informed him about them.
Each terrorist was given a specific amount of information, which is needed to carry out their attack. The investigating agencies feel that the video clippings of the targeted locations may have been shot by local modules and sent across to Pakistan. These clippings were shown to these men, who carried out the attack at these places.
An ATS official said that it is extremely necessary for them to crack the local module, which helped carry out this attack.
"The man in our custody tried to mislead us and there are certain statements by him are contradictory in nature."
ATS officials suspect that the terrorist might have been trained in withholding information during interrogations.
This tactic, introduced by armies across the world, was picked up by terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Tayiba and the Students Islamic Movement of India.
The ATS says that they are awaiting the forensic results for further investigations.
