Monday, December 01, 2008

BECAUSE THE AUTHORITIES WERE UNPREPARED, THAT'S WHY MUMBAI SUFFERED

Here's an explanation why India has been victimized only so many times by terrorist attacks (Hat tip: Power Line):
In the first wave of the attacks, two young gunmen armed with assault rifles blithely ignored more than 60 police officers patrolling the city's main train station and sprayed bullets into the crowd. Bapu Thombre, assistant commissioner with the Mumbai railway police, said the police were armed mainly with batons or World War I-era rifles and spread out across the station.

"They are not trained to respond to major attacks," he said.

The gunmen continued their rampage outside the station. They eventually ambushed a police van, killed five officers inside - including the city's counterterrorism chief - and hijacked the vehicle as two wounded officers lay bleeding in the back seat.

"The way Mumbai police handled the situation, they were not combat ready," said Jimmy Katrak, a security consultant. "You don't need the Indian army to neutralize eight to nine people."

Constable Arun Jadhav, one of the wounded policemen, said the men laughed when they noticed the dead officers wore bulletproof vests.
Bulletproof vests will not protect head, arms and legs, and if the monsters knew how and where to aim, that's why the policemen were murdered.

Aside from that, there's the problem of that the police were not trained to deal with situations like these, which is simply atrocious. According to this article from Time, the residents of Mumbai want some answers and changes. More precisely, as I can tell, they want improvements:
Terrorist attacks in India have increased in scale and frequency over the past decade. This year alone, the country's biggest cities - including New Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Jaipur, among others - have suffered bomb blasts that have killed hundreds of people. Mumbai, the country's financial center, was attacked in a series of bombing in 1993 that killed 257 people, and again in the 2006 train bombings that killed 184. Each time, the city dusted itself off and got back to work, buoyed by the seemingly indomitable "Mumbai spirit." But this time, Mumbaikars aren't in a rush to restore normalcy; they want answers and they want changes. (See pictures of Mumbai in the aftermath of the attacks.)
And they should have, more precisely, improvements. Noise must be made in order to bring that about, and no rest should be had until a campaign for better security yields results.

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