Mumbai suspect gives attack details

The alleged gunman captured in last month’s Mumbai attacks had originally intended to seize hostages and outline demands in a series of dramatic calls to the media, according to his confession obtained Saturday.

Ajmal Amir Kasab said he and his partner, who massacred dozens of people in the city’s main train terminus, had planned a rooftop standoff, but abandoned the plan because they couldn’t find a suitable building, the statement to police says.

Kasab’s seven-page confession, given to police over repeated interrogations, offers chilling new details of the three-day rampage through India’s commercial center that left more than 170 people dead.

After reaching Mumbai, Kasab and Ismail Khan, the group’s ringleader, headed to the train station by taxi.

“Ismail and myself went to the common toilet, took out the weapons from our sacks, loaded them, came out of toilet and started firing indiscriminately toward the passengers,” Kasab told police.

As a police officer opened fire, the two men retaliated with grenades before entering another part of the station and randomly shooting more commuters.

The men then searched for a building with a rooftop where they had been told to hold hostages and call a contact known as Chacha, whom Kasab identified as Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the suspected Pakistani mastermind behind the attacks. Chacha, which means “uncle” in Hindi, would supply phone numbers for news outlets and specify what demands the two should make.

Taking heavy fire from police, the two had trouble finding a “suitable building” and stormed a hospital they mistook for an apartment building. There, they searched for hostages and traded more gunfire with security officers.

In the confession, Kasab, 21, describes his conversion from a street criminal to a loyal soldier for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group banned by Pakistan in 2002 and blamed by India for the attacks. Kasab is being held on 12 charges, including murder and waging war against the country, but has not yet been formally charged.