INDIA: ISLAMIC JIHAD SHOOTINGS, BOMB BLASTS UPDATED: CLOSE TO 100 DEAD,900 INJURED:"MASSIVE TERROR ATTACK" UNFOLDING

UPDATE: Report: Mumbai Terrorists Abducted Chabad Rabbi's Family

MUMBAI: The terrorists, who created havoc here overnight, came by boats and struck at 10 places but their number is not known immediately

Fire engulfs a part of the Taj Hotel

LIVE COVERAGE HERE! (hat tip Martin)

UPDATED: Analysis: 700 have died in Indian terrorist attacks, but no cases have been solved

Nearly 700 people have died and hundreds have been maimed in terrorist strikes across India over the past three years, but none of these cases have been solved and no convictions secured.

Muslims have attacked at least 7 hotels and restaurants. There are over 100 injured, possibly 80 dead and the battle is still going on. They are holding hostages. If you think you are safe in the west, stop drinking the bong water. How long before this starts happening here?

UPDATE: They targeted Jews: INDIAN REPORT SAYS THREE DEAD IN CHABAD HOUSE:

According to CNN/IBN, three people were killed after shots were heard in the area of Chabad House in Mumbai, Israel Radio reported Thursday morning. The dead, a couple and a 16-year-old boy, were shot inside the Chabad House, the report said.

Chabad fears for safety of its Mumbai rabbi and his wife  Hat tip Cynthia

Are we allowed to talk about it, or is this insulting to Islam and in violation of the UN resolution against "defaming Islam".

Mumbai shooters targeted Americans, British Jihadwatch

More on Mumbai, or Bombay, as it used to be more commonly known, in calmer days. "Foreigners targeted in coordinated Bombay attacks," by Rhys Blakely in the Times, November 26 (thanks to Alan):

Gunmen stalked a hotel in Bombay looking for British and US passport holders during co-ordinated attacks across the city that have left at least 80 dead.

A series of shootings and bomb blasts at luxury hotels and bars in the south of the city hit at least nine locations. Security sources said “a major terror attack” was unfolding amid reports that foreigners had been taken hostage in one hotel.

Shootings were reported in the lobby of the five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel in the Colaba area of south Bombay and at the nearby Leopolds bar, a popular destination with western backpackers. Witnesses described pools of blood and bullet scarred walls at both locations.

A witness at the hotel told a local television station: “They wanted anyone with British or American passports.

"They wanted foreigners.”

It was feared that the death toll could rise significantly....

Shootings at Mumbai luxury hotels: "No doubt in my mind" they were jihad attacks

Mumbai Shootings Update. "Unknown terrorists have conducted a coordinated attack across Mumbai's major tourist hubs, with over a dozen deaths and many injuries reported," from SkyNews, November 26 (thanks to Alan):

Gunmen have targeted luxury hotels, a popular tourist attraction and a crowded train station in at least seven attacks across India's financial capital.

NDTVare reporting an eighth attack at the JW Marriott hotel.

Terrorists are reportedly still holed up at in three places, including Oberoi and Taj hotels.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) are advising all Britons in Mumbai to stay indoors.

The FCO also report a further explosion near Mumbai airport.

The death toll is unknown. Officials have said at least 25 people have been wounded.

Reuters are reporting at least 18 fatalities.

The Times of India are reporting as many as 80 people killed and 250 injured in the attacks.

The police commissioner A. N. Roy said: "These are terrorist strikes in at least seven places."

He added: "The terrorists have used automatic weapons and in some places grenades have been lobbed."

Tory MEP Witnessed Shootings

Gunmen opened fire on two of the city's best known luxury hotels, the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi.

They also attacked the crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus station in southern Mumbai and Leopold's restaurant, a Mumbai landmark.

It was not immediately clear what the motive was for the attacks.

An eyewitness report says one of the attackers asked tourists if they were British or American before opening fire.

Alex Chamberlain added there was "no doubt in my mind" that the attacks were the result of a fundamentalist Islamic terror attack....

A man carries a victim of a gun attack at the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, India, Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008. A top state officials says at least 40 people have been killed and 100 have been injured when gunmen opened fire on a crowded Mumbai train station, luxury hotels and a restaurant popular with tourists. Johnny Joseph, chief secretary for Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, says the death toll could rise further. A.N. Roy, a senior police officer, says police were battling the gunmen

A policeman gives water to an injured child at a hospital in Mumbai November 26, 2008. At least 10 people were killed and 26 wounded in a series of shootings around India's financial capital Mumbai on Wednesday night, with two five-star hotels among the targets in what police called a terror attack. Maharahstra state police chief A.N. Roy said attackers had fired automatic weapons indiscriminately, and used grenades, adding that they were still holed up in some buildings.

UPDATE: Hat tip wolf:

Update | 8:46 p.m. Wired blogger Noah Shachtman points out that “First-hand accounts of the deadly Mumbai attacks are pouring in on Twitter, Flickr, and other social media.”

Shachtman rounds up links to Twitter accounts which are being updated minute by minute, including one on Mumbai and another called BreakingNewz.

The samples Shachtman quotes — “Hospital update. Shots still being fired. Also Metro cinema next door,” tweets mumbaiattack. “Blood needed at JJ hospital,” adds aeropolowoman, supplying the numbers for the blood bank. — are among the more newsy. What is striking is how Twitter blends together accounts from people who have real, even first-hand information, and notes from people who are watching TV or reading the Web and passing on second or third-hand accounts.

Schachtman also draws our attention to a Google map of the attack sites, which has been created and “a shockingly-current Wikipedia page.”

View Larger Map

Update | 8:34 p.m. According to NDTV “more than 100 hostages” are still being held in the Taj hotel. Their man on the scene outside the Taj says that the hostages are not contained in one area, but are spread throughout the hotel and that no explosions have been heard for about 20 minutes.

Just now though, gun fire was clearly audible in or around the Taj.

Update | 8:18 p.m. Another source of live video from Mumbai is the Web site of NDTV, where the latest report from outside the Taj Hotel is that more gunfire has broken out in the area of the hotel’s lobby.

IBN reports that police sources tell them that 4 or 5 foreign hostages are still being held on the 19th floor of the Oberoi hotel.

Update | 8:05 p.m. More eyewitness accounts: Britain’s The Guardian talked by cell phone with a Member of the European Parliament, who said he was barricaded in the basement of the Taj Hotel.

“Some of us split one way and some another,” said Sajjad Karim, who represents the North West of England in Europe’s legislative body. “A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me. I managed to turn away and I ran into the hotel kitchen and then we were shunted into a restaurant in the basement.”

“We are now in the dark in this room and we’ve barricaded all the doors. It’s really bad.”

Update | 8:00 p.m. Amit Varma, a Mumbai blogger, gives us a sense of how these attacks clash with the normal atmosphere in this cosmopolitan city:

This is turning out to be one crazy night. A friend of mine had an opening of her art exhibition a few hours ago, so we ventured to South Bombay for that. We attended the exhibition, sipped the litchee juice, nibbled on party snacks, and then six of us headed out for dinner. First we tried Indigo Deli, which is a couple of hundred metres from the Taj. We were told there would be a 25-minute wait. So we headed to All Stir Fry, the restaurant in the Gordon House Hotel in a lane down from there. They told us we’d have to wait 20 minutes. We stepped out again, and as we did so, we heard gunshots, and saw people running towards us from the left side.

One of the hotel employees rushed out and told us to get back in. “There must have been an encounter,” he said. “Get back in, you’ll be safe inside.”

We followed him in. We waited in the lounge-bar upstairs for a while. The big screen there was showing cricket. India won. Then someone changed the channel.

That’s when we realised that this was much more than a random police encounter, or a couple of gunshots. We heard that terrorists with AK-47s had opened fire outside Leopold’s, the pub down the road. We heard there was firing elsewhere in the city as well, including in the Taj. We watched transfixed, and as the apparent scale of the incidents grew, we realised we couldn’t go home. We asked if they had a room vacant; they did, so we settled in, switched on the TV, and watched in horror.

Update | 7:19 p.m. A spokesman for President-elect Barack Obama said that Mr. Obama “strongly condemns today’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and his thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and the people of India.

The statement continues

These coordinated attacks on innocent civilians demonstrate the grave and urgent threat of terrorism. The United States must continue to strengthen our partnerships with India and nations around the world to root out and destroy terrorist networks. We stand with the people of India, whose democracy will prove far more resilient than the hateful ideology that led to these attacks.

Update | 7:04 p.m. One of our readers, Kamla Bhatt, points us to the Flickr page of Vinukumar Ranganathan, which has a series of photographs of the aftermath of the attacks.

Update | 6:50 p.m. Michael Rubenstein, a photographer working with The New York Times reports from outside the Taj hotel in Mumbai that the top floor of the hotel is still on fire and that hotel guests are banging on the windows begging to be rescued.

Update | 6:29 p.m. The Web site of the South Asian Journalists Association, SAJA Forum, will be hosting another live discussion on the attacks in Mumbai at 10 p.m. New York time. Suketu Mehta, the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found” will take part. You can listen to the discussion via Blog Talk Radio or participate via phone by calling +1-347-324-5991.

Update | 6:23 p.m. For those unable to load the live video from IBN’s Web site, we have this video report from MSNBC.com on the attacks in Mumbai.

Update | 6:02 p.m. At Mumbai’s Taj Hotel, firefighters have rescued several people from lower floors and are still battling fires on the upper floors.

Earlier in the evening, a leading anti-terrorism official, Hemant Karkare, was killed in what Indian TV described as “a shootout with terrorists at the Taj Mahal Hotel.” CNN-IBN’s report features a photograph of Mr. Karkare getting ready to take part in the action.

Update | 5:52 p.m. The Indian TV news channel CNN-IBN reports from outside the upscale Oberoi Hotel that Indian military forces entered the hotel after gunshots were heard inside.

CNN-IBN’s Web site reports that earlier this morning

The Army stormed Hotel Taj Intercontinental in Mumbai early on Thursday morning to flush out terrorists holed up inside. Plumes of smoke were seen billowing out of the top floor of the hotel and there were reports of the floor catching fire after a bomb - the sixth in a series of blasts heard from inside the hotel - exploded. The attack on the 22-storey, five-star hotel by the Arabian Sea was one among the seven daring strikes across various locations in south Mumbai.

The Web site of CNN-IBN, an English-language Indian TV news channel, is streaming live video from Mumbai of events as they continue to unfold. At 3:50 a.m. local time, the broadcast was dominated by dramatic images of the Taj Hotel on fire and reports of hostages still being held.

Details of what happened tonight in the city are still developing. In her most recent update, Somini Sengupta, chief of the New York Times news bureau in New Delhi, reports:

The state’s highest ranking police official, A.N. Roy, said the attackers, armed with machine guns and grenades, opened fire and disappeared. Local television reported deaths tolls as high as 80, none of them could be confirmed and the police were yet to give an official count of their own.

Her article will continue to be updated throughout the evening.

The Web site of the South Asian Journalists Association, SAJA Forum, is hosting a live discussion with journalists and experts in Mumbai and the United States on the attacks, and a comment thread there contains a large number of links to other reports online.

We have posted Indian television footage of the chaotic aftermath of the attacks. The BBC is also streaming video from India’s Star TV.

We expect to have more video and links to other sources of information soon.

As Randeep Ramesh of The Guardian notes, Mumbai has a grim history of large-scale violence:

Mumbai has frequently been targeted in terror attacks, including a series of blasts in July 2006 that killed 187 people.

The city has been hit repeatedly by attacks since March 1993, when Muslim underworld figures tied to Pakistani militants allegedly carried out a series of bombings on Mumbai’s stock exchange, trains, hotels and gas stations.

Authorities say those attacks, which killed 257 people and wounded more than 1,100, were carried out to revenge the deaths of hundreds of Muslims in religious riots which had swept India.

Ten years later, in 2003, 52 people were killed in Mumbai bombings blamed on Muslim militants and in July 2006 a series of seven blasts ripped through railway trains and commuter rail stations. At least 187 died in those attacks.

Comments

[pythagoras]

This is very, very sad to see Islam's inhumanity in action as it always is. I was actually planning to travel to India this year but thought better of doing so when I learned of the recent upsurge in violent jihad activity there.

I'm glad now I didn't go. I suspect the window of travel to India may have closed for the remainder of our lfetimes.

My condolences to the many, many victims there.

India needs a new government ASAP--one that doesn't cave in to terrorists' demands. A lesson to be learned in...the Twilight Zone (where the entire world seems to be stuck for the present time).

[jj]

pamela:

any word yet from the messiah, b. hussein obama, on how he intends to rid the world of terrorism?

he has issued forth on every other conceivable topic, he has sent malley to egypt and malley met there with g_d knows who else, but he has yet to say much about islamic fundamentalism, which spawned, fueled and sustains jihad terror around the world.

what has the golden child said, what has the chosen one, the one who make little girls swoon when he says "change," ... , what, precisely, does he intend to do about this, ... , and what does he intend to do about afghanistan, ... , and what does he intend to do in iraq, ... , and just how is osama obama gonna deal with obama osama? what does he intend to do about islamic fundamentalism as the roots of terror?

perhaps he is conferring with bill ayers, or khalid al mansour, even as i type. now that, i find believable. and, if perchance you happen to read this, and you do not understand the references, it is time you learned.

john jay
milton freewater, oregon usa

p.s. you can "google" bill ayers. my guess is, bill ayers, merely a terrorist bomber and murderer, and now in addition, a "respected" universty professor and associate of b. hussein obama, is not "in the sand box" at google. try it. find out. oh, yes, the times they are a changing.

[jj]

pamela:

as hard as it is to comprehend and accept, people have to learn to turn on and attack these murderous thugs, take their weapons from them, and tear them limb from limb, instead of turning and fleeing, and simply becomeing fleeing targets.

this is what separates the thompson's gazelle from the baboon, as strange as it may sound.

the herd animal flees, each individual hoping to find salvation in the confusion the predator has in trying to pick out an individual to attack: the herd animal says, i hope it is not me!

the higher animals, such as baboons, attack their attackers. the leopard who attacks a group of baboons or higher apes on the move, had best be quick about it, because these animals, especially baboons, will lauch concerted group attacks on it, the first animals on scene knowing that almost certain death awaits them, but they engage the predator until their fellows can get there and kill it.

to me, this seems the preferable alternative. i was struck by the person who was standing next to a shooter, and did nothing except run. it simply did not occur to that person, that the shooter, his gun wrested from him, was no more formidible a threat to the speaker than the speaker to him. so her or she ran, and the shooting continued. it was only by fortune that the person who related this did not catch two or three rounds in teh back as he or she fled.

pure shithouse luck as we put it in n.e. oregon. people have to learn to defend themselves, which all people did before the advent of police forces. time to relearn old skills.

or, remain sheep.

john jay
milton freewater, oregon. usa

[TINBH]

9:30 am local time - Mumbai is still under attack by muslim mass murders.

Among those murdered – in addition to the innocent citizens of Mumbai- include a Japanese national, 3 Israelis, 11 Mumbai police –5 were the top officers on the force;

Confirmed:

Brazilian citizens have been taken hostage;

5-10 Israeli families living in the “Nariman House” of Colaba residential district -corroborated by “Debka File” as members of the Chabad Center of Mumbai – 3 persons of this group are confirmed as being murdered.

Police and Special Forces troops are surrounding the Nariman House as well as Taj and Oberoi Hotel with sporadic gun fire between muslim murders and Mumbai authorities.

There are a number of muslim mass murders apparently on the loose elsewhere in the city.

All the results of the arabic-religion.

[TINBH]

Close to 18 pounds of "RDZ" high-explosives stashed near the Taj Hotel have just been found - leading to the speculation that muslim mass murders planned to blow the hotel.

[TINBH]

RDX vice RDZ

[luckybee]

The mujahedin don't need to protect dar Al Islam anymore,like Iraq because the American are going to leave Iraq.That's why they can attac Dar Al Herb. India is also Dar Al Herb like our country's . That 's the reason that I agreed with what G.W. Bush was doing to attac Iraq, the centre of the islamic world.Altough I prefer the attac on Saudi Arabie, the two town of Mekka and Medina.What happend if this two town dissapeard of the face of this earth?Will there be no more Mujahedins?or islam?

[JewishOdysseus]

You can't be a normal human being and look at the 3d photo Pam has up there (the terrorist with the "Versa" t-shirt) and not be stunned by the utterly homicidal and demented bloodlust shining from his lunatic face. Something right out of the movies, or the Manson case--maybe he was doped up for his hideous "mission"?

Well, NBC News's Brian Williams must not be a normal human being, because when he showed that same photo on the 7 o'clock news tonight, HIS comment was: "You can't help but be struck by how...YOUNG sone of these attackers are."

Look at that photo again.

Yeah, "young." That's what really shines though.

If you cannot objectify and morally dehumanize and target demented mass murderers who seek to destroy your civilization, then you are well and truly f@cked.

When all you see is their "youth," you are well and truly f@cked up the @ss.

My motto? "SHOOT THEM LIKE THE MAD DOGS THEY ARE."

:V"

[kaps]

jewishodysseus, you nailed it:
" the utterly homicidal and demented bloodlust shining from his lunatic face."

we are now viewed as weak, soft and vulnerable with this pansy ass now about to step into ofc.

this whole election was about terrorism for me...but obviously not for the millions who crawled back into their cocoons of forgetfullness after 2001's viscious attacks.

put on your seatbelts folks.

[yonason]

...AND SO IT STARTS

"Blame The Jews"

[seeteufel]

Proves once again the Muslims cannot be allowed to live with civilized people, they should be ostracized by every country that wants to remain free and prosperous.