'Le Carré's spies were nothing like the exotic Kim of Kipling or the caricature that is James Bond.' 'Driven by a simple patriotism, held back by incompetence and politics, his characters use deceit and treachery to win their morally Pyrrhic victories,' notes P Rajendran.
Hours after an Indian court convicted Ajmal Kasab for involvement in the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Monday said his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh had told him that he trusted Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of the carnage to justice.
The Jamaat-ud-Dawah on Monday claimed the acquittal by an Indian court of two suspects linked to the Mumbai attacks had shown that Indian authorities had 'no proof of Pakistan's involvement' in the 26/11 terrorist carnage.
On the day of Ajmal Kasab's trial verdict, rediff.com's Nithya Ramani and Abhishek Mande visit the ill-fated hospitals and discover how staff members are coming to terms with 26/11
Action will be taken against Hasan Gafoor, who was the Mumbai police commissioner during the 26/11 terror attacks, for his outbursts accusing four senior police officers of dereliction of duty during the carnage, Maharashtra Home Minister R R Patil said on Monday.
The Karachi-based D-Company run by India's most wanted fugitive underworld don Dawood Ibrahim possibly had an important role in the 26/11 carnage, according to a report on the Lashkar-e-Tayiba released by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, the Department of Defence. The D-Company may have provided logistical support to the LeT operatives to carry out the deadly operation, adding a new dimension to the Mumbai terror attacks, it said.
Setting off powerful explosions and firing from automatic weapons, militants dressed in battle fatigues on Monday made a brazen attempt to storm the US consulate within the cantonment in Peshawar today, killing at least one person and injuring several others.
Chief Minister Narendra Modi was questioned for five hours by the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team on Saturday on his alleged role in the Gujarat riots. This is the first time he was probed since the carnage eight years ago.
Rediff.com journalists Vaihayasi Pande Daniel and Rajesh Karkera attend an emotionally-charged ceremony marking the killing of Jewish Rabbi Gavriel and his wife Rivka Holtzberg in the attack on Chabad House during the 26/11 carnage. They also attend a parallel ceremony, mourning slain NSG commando Gajendra Singh.
Two Israeli Jews take an emotional tour of the Chabad House, which was targetted by terrorists during the Novmeber 26, 2008 carnage, along with rediff.com journalists Prasanna D Zore and Abhishek Mande.
A year after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed nearly 180 people, most Pakistanis have little or nothing to say about the carnage that shook India. Leading newspapers were silent on the tragedy and so were Pakistanis who are active in the virtual world.
A couple who lost their eight-month-old during the truck attack in Nice have been reunited with their baby after an appeal went out on Facebook.
37-year-old Frumet Teitelbaum, an Israeli citizen, was stopped by US Customs and Border Protection agents at Kennedy Airport after flying in from Israel on February 5. Her husband Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, who was studying in the Chabad Center, was killed in the 26/11 strikes. Since her husband's death, Frumet, a religious-studies teacher, had been regularly traveling without problemsfrom her home in Israel to the US to visit her children in New York.
Peter Handscomb struck his maiden ODI hundred and Ashton Turner smashed a blistering 84 not out to secure Australia's series-levelling four-wicket victory against India in the high-scoring fourth one-day international in Mohali on Sunday.
American terror suspect David Headley had also stayed at Oberoi Trident besides the Taj -- the two hotels attacked on 26/11 -- before the Mumbai carnage, reinforcing suspicion of his link with the audacious strike, according to investigators on Friday.
Jamaat-ud-Dawah chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, blamed by India for masterminding the 2008 Mumbai carnage, on Tuesday night said New Delhi has never presented any evidence to back up its assertions that his group was involved in several terrorist attacks.
The ministry said that they are continuing to deliver just punishment to those whose hands are stained with the blood of Iraqis.
Terror struck Pune on Saturday night as a powerful bomb ripped apart a popular bakery near a Jewish prayer house, killing nine people, including five women and a foreigner, and injuring 32 others, in the first major attack since the 26/11 carnage. The improvised explosive device, kept in an unattended packet outside the kitchen of the German bakery, exploded at approximately 7.30 pm, when a waiter attempted to open it.
Dozens of young students have gone missing from Beed in the last eight years. While intelligence agencies fear that the youth have been brainwashed into the doctrine of terror in the wake of the communal carnage in Gujarat, anxious family members spend sleepless nights worrying over the safety of their missing sons.
Who's the real Abu Jindal aka Zabiuddin Ansari? This is one of the most disturbing questions that the residents of Beed and Gevrai towns, in the dusty cotton bowl of Beed district in Maharashtra, are trying to come to terms with ever since news broke out that intelligence agencies have identified one of the handlers from Pakistan, who spoke to the 26/11 terrorists at the Chabad House, as Syed Zabiuddin Syed Zakiuddin aka Abu Jindal.
In the first ever carnage during the National Democratic Alliance regime led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, 16 people were gunned down by suspected Maoist cadres in a village in Bihar's Khagaria district late on Thursday night."Nearly 100 people, suspected to be Maoists, armed with automatic weapons, attacked the village Amosi Bharen Diara and fired indiscriminately late on Thursday night, killing 11 men and 5 children on the spot," said a police official.
Legal experts told rediff.com that there is no hard and fast rule that mercy petitions should be disposed off in order. The President can take a call and take up the matter out of turn. The President must be satisfied that there is an extraordinary circumstance concerning this case and hence it must be taken out of turn.
Judge M L Tahaliyani on Thursday awarded the death sentence to Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist arrested during the terror siege on the city in November 2008, for the carnage that had claimed 166 lives.
The usage of the phrase 'rarest of rare cases' has a very interesting history attached to it in India.
Pakistan's Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik has confirmed the arrest of one more suspect in the Mumbai terror attacks and asked India to provide more information to proceed against those detained for perpetrating the carnage.
"It is kind of national shame that even after two decades, the matters are still pending. The Delhi High Court had already fixed a time frame of six months to wind up the trial," senior counsel R S Cheema, appearing for the CBI, submitted before Additional Sessions Judge Sunita Gupta.
Claiming that the Mumbai carnage had "significant support from within India itself," President Asif Ali Zardari has said Pakistan needs cooperation from India to build the case for "effective prosecution" of the accused in courts in his country.
'Great social change brings great linguistic change, and that has never been truer than in this current global crisis.'
Sympathies for the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, the group involved in Mumbai carnage, and its jihadist and anti-India culture run deep in the Pakistani establishment, raising a serious challenge to any long-lasting move to dismantle the terror network.
US terror suspect David Headley had conducted a detailed reccee of Nariman House before the Mumbai carnage and even entered the targeted Jewish Centre posing as a Jew, official sources said on Thursday. The new detail of Headley's movement in this western metropolis prior to the 26/11 attack came on the back of evidence that the US national had also visited and stayed at Taj and Oberoi here--the two luxury hotels which was attacked.
In his new book Mumbai 26/11: A Day of Infamy, B Raman takes a typically incisive look at last November's terror carnage in Mumbai, which he believes was truly an attack by Pakistan on India, and suggests ways we can prevent a recurrence of such attacks.
India on Friday handed over to Pakistan the replies to the 30 questions, about the terror attack on Mumbai in November last year, posed by that country. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee handed over India' reply to Pakistan High Commissioner Sahid Malik. Earlier, Home Minister P Chidambaram had handed over the document along with evidence to Mukherjee. He had added that each and every question posed by Islamabad had been answered adequately.
The statement by Lt General Michael Maples, Director, Defence Intelligence Agency of the US Army, in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee comes a day after the State Department said Pakistan needs to do more in bringing the perpetrators of the Mumbai terrorist attack to justice.
Shoukatullah Ghouri, a suspect in the seven year old Aksharadham temple attack case, was taken to Gujarat by a police team after he was nabbed at the Hyderabad International Airport in a joint operation by the counter intelligence wing and the Hyderabad police.
A Pakistani national has been detained in Dhaka in connection with the Mumbai terror attack. The Pakistani detainee was reportedly responsible for running the financial network of the LeT and preparing the groundwork for the actual attack. The Pakistani national held in Dhaka is also linked to the LeT.
"Bangladesh is at risk of more sabotage," on the pattern of last weeks bloody mutiny by the nations's paramilitary force, which left 73 people dead, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has warned. "The conspirators are not finished yet," she said while cautioning that her administration will have to remain alert.
India's Virat Kohli led from the front with a sparkling 61 not out to help secure a series-levelling six-wicket victory over Australia in the third and final Twenty20 International in Sydney.
B Raman's latest book 26/11: A Day of Infamy critically examines India's failure to learn from its worst terrorist attack.
The Gujarat High Court on Monday dismissed a petition challenging the Central Pota Review Committee's recommendation of dropping Prevention of Terrorism Act charges against the accused in Godhra train carnage case. With this decision, nearly 134 accused in the Godhra train burning case will not be tried under the repealed anti-terror law.
Time-tested methods have no place in the game of intelligence -- the trick lies in ever inventing something new and something least expected, says Ajit Doval, former Intelligence Bureau Director.
