BBC says Mumbai LeT cell helped 26/11attackers

LONDON: Pakistan-based terrorist leaders who conveyed precise police positions to the 26/11 attackers may have been guided by LeT spotters on the ground in Mumbai rather than by live television coverage, a BBC investigative report claimed.

The report, shown on BBC Television, said that leaders of the ten terrorists who attacked Mumbai on November 26 were directing events minute-by-minute on mobile phones, routing all calls over the internet.

The BBC Newsnight correspondent, Richard Watson, who carried out the investigation said "it is astonishingly clear from these calls that the terrorist leaders, said to be in Pakistan, knew every move the police were making as the hostage crisis unfolded."

But these instructions seem remarkably precise for that. "I know the kind of live-shots used in these situations and they would be unlikely to yield that kind of detail. It is far more likely that they had spotters on the ground who were feeding back information to their leaders about the police movements," Watson said.

If this is true, then it means a LeT cell in Mumbai played a crucial role in the attacks which is still undiscovered, Watson wrote, admitting that the possibility of local Muslim involvement would be politically damaging for India.