The Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 paralyzed the city for nearly four days. In March 2019, a movie about the incident, Hotel Mumbai will hit theaters.
Starting on November 26, 2008, ten Islamic terrorists conducted a dozen, well-coordinated attacks across the Indian city. The bulk of the attacks occurred over 60 hours, killing 174 and wounding hundreds more.
You read that right: ten terrorists ran roughshod through the massive Indian city (population 18 million) for days. Clearly, the local authorities had no ability to handle such an attack.
While America has a well-established gun culture, India very much does not. At that time of the attacks, many local cops worked unarmed. A few police officers had old, bordering on obsolete bolt-action .303 British rifles. Some had never fired them before. Ever. Other officers had revolvers issued to them, and like the cops with rifles, they had little or no training in their use.
Up against well-trained and highly-motivated terrorists using modern AK-56 rifles (a Chinese version of the AK-47) with seven magazines each, hand grenades, and improvised explosive devices, the Indian cops fared very poorly.
While the attack did not eclipse earlier Muslim terror attacks in India in terms of casualties, many regard this one as the worst. A Rand Corp. report on the attack explains why it’s known as India’s 9/11:
Nevertheless, some aspects of this attack were significant, namely, its audacious and ambitious scope, the complexity of the operation, and the diversity of its targets. The prolonged nature of the episode, which went on for 60 hours with the steadily mounting death toll, made it a slow-motion shoot-out and siege that mesmerized the world’s news media.
Now, almost eleven years later, we have a movie about what happened at the world-famous Taj Hotel during that attack.
Terrorism can strike anywhere, any time. As if we needed another reason to carry a concealed weapon every day.