26/11 Lessons Wasted: Mumbai Goes on Alert While Suspects Surface in Lahore

Mumbai Police released photographs of three alleged terrorists, out of five, that it claimed belonged to the banned outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and had entered Mumbai.

The three, however, turned out to be in Lahore — with two of them running businesses and one serving as a security guard at the city's famed electronics market, Hafeez Centre. Pakistan's Express Tribune, which tracked them down, reported that the men were so alarmed at seeing their faces in the Indian media as terror suspects that they approached a local police station seeking security.

The episode was an embarrassment layered on top of an alert. Days earlier, Home Minister P. Chidambaram had told chief ministers that central agencies had received specific inputs about an imminent terrorist attack, and several states were notified with targets identified. The five men in the photographs were the faces of that warning.

When the Pakistani report surfaced, Union Home Secretary R. K. Singh stood by the advisory. Speaking to NDTV, he said the advisory was based on credible information and that he would not comment on its contents since investigations were ongoing. Pakistan issued no official reaction.

The timing compounded the awkwardness. On May 5, Chidambaram had pressed chief ministers to agree to the controversial National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) — his flagship proposal for a federal anti-terror body. Critics of the proposal seized on the photo fiasco as evidence of exactly the kind of intelligence sloppiness that a new bureaucracy would not fix.

Whether the five men were genuinely suspects misidentified by the press, or the product of a bad intelligence input, was never fully clarified in public. What was clear was the pattern: an alert sounded, photographs broadcast, ordinary citizens named as terrorists, and the trail ending not in Mumbai but in a Lahore mobile-phone market — with the accused men themselves walking into a police station to prove they were shopkeepers and a security guard.

Four years after 26/11, the machinery meant to prevent the next attack still could not reliably tell a terrorist from a shopkeeper.