Pakistan-based terrorist leaders who conveyed precise police positions to the 26/11 attackers may have been guided by LeT spotters on the ground in Mumbai rather than by live television coverage, a BBC investigative report claimed on Sunday.

The report, to be shown on BBC Television on Monday night, said leaders of the 10 terrorists who attacked Mumbai on November 26 were directing events minute by minute on mobile phones, routing all calls over the Internet.

BBC Newsnight correspondent Richard Watson, who carried out the investigation, said “it is astonishingly clear from these calls that the terrorist leaders, said to be in Pakistan, knew every move the police were making as the hostage crisis unfolded”.

“But these instructions seem remarkably precise for that. I know the kind of live shots used in these situations and they would be unlikely to yield that kind of detail. It is far more likely that they had spotters on the ground who were feeding back information to their leaders about the police movements,” Watson said.

If this is true, then it means an LeT cell in Mumbai which is still undiscovered played a crucial role in the attacks, Watson wrote, admitting the possibility of local Muslim involvement would be politically damaging for India.

According to the report, Indian intelligence intercepts of the calls, some of which were obtained by the producers of the programme, are crucial to the police investigation, especially in relation to the attack on the Jewish centre at Nariman House.

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