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They looked like they were on a family outing. On Aug. 25, Syed Hanif, a middle-aged auto-rickshaw driver living in the northern Bombay area of Chimatpada, climbed into a taxi along with his wife, Fahmida, and two daughters, 16-year-old Farheen and four-year-old Shakira. As police later recounted, Hanif threw a heavy bag into the trunk of the cab and instructed the driver to take them to the Gateway of India, a Bombay landmark and one of the city's most popular tourist spots. Once there, the family told the driver to wait for them while they had lunch. Within a few minutes of their departure, the taxi exploded, turning the square in front of the Gateway into a bloody mess of corpses and mangled limbs.
Last week, police raided Chimatpada, a maze of slum houses, cheap restaurants and noisy industrial workshops, bursting into the pink-walled shanty where the Hanifs lived. Inside, says chief investigator Rakesh Maria, they found 22 detonators, 235 gelatin sticks, 14 timing devices, wires and soldering equipment. As the authorities tell it, the Hanifs collaborated with a 26-year-old embroiderer, Arshat Ansari, to pull off the Aug. 25 bombings that killed 52 and injured 175 in Bombay. While Ansari allegedly placed his bomb in a taxi at Zaveri Bazaar, a crowded jewelry market, police say the Hanifs had packed explosives in the bag they stashed in the taxi's trunk, then detonated it at the Gateway. With their youngest daughter, Shakira, in tow, the Hanifs then walked through the panic-stricken crowds to safety. Although Hanif's third child, a teenage boy, was not involved, Maria says Hanif's wife and teenage daughter "were both willing accomplices."
This family outing was meticulously planned. Police say Hanif, Fahmida and Farheen had even made a trial run in the same taxi the previous day, with Ansari. They overlooked just one detail: while Ansari's driver was blown up along with his taxi at Zaveri Bazaar, the Hanifs' cabbie stepped out of his cab for a bite and so lived to provide the police with a sketch of a family that an informant would later identify as the Hanifs.
At first, some officials suspected the outlawed Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which has carried out similar bombings in the past. The authorities say they have yet to find any links between SIMI, the Hanifs and Ansari, but, says Bombay's joint Commissioner of Police Satya Pal Singh, "we suspect they might exist." The police also see the hidden hand of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant Islamic group committed to ending Indian rule in Kashmir. Police believe Hanif was recruited by Lashkar while working as an electrician at a hotel in Dubai and returned to Chimatpada in 2002 as a hardened extremist trained in the use of explosives. Police suspect that Lashkar operatives introduced him to Ansari and to two other men, called Nasir and Zahid, who helped in the planning and financing of the blasts—and who remain at large.
Outwardly at least, Hanif did not seem dangerous. Neighbors saw him as a quiet, religious, hardworking man, who left home every morning at daybreak and returned late. In Chimatpada, where Hanif's auto-rickshaw sits covered in blue tarpaulin, there is now a sense of shock and bewilderment over the arrests. "We simply can't believe it," says Amir Jaha, who lives two blocks from the Hanifs. "They were just like any of us."
Nor did anyone suspect that a terror cell might be functioning in this kind of neighborhood. Bombay authorities have typically focused their search for Islamic terrorists in the city's Muslim-dominated suburbs, such as Mahim or Jogeshwari. Though it has a larger-than-average Muslim population, Chimatpada is a mixed neighborhood; just a few doors down from the Hanifs' home hangs a portrait of Jesus. Yet here in this congested slum, nobody appears to have noticed anything amiss as the Hanifs allegedly amassed their massive cache of explosives. "We mind our own business," says Mohammad Faisal, a tailor who lives close to the Hanifs' house. "Once the doors are closed, we have no idea what happens here." Now that it's too late, they are starting to wonder.
- Aravind Adiga | Bombay
- The suspects accused of the Bombay bombings include a quiet Indian couple and their 16-year-old daughter