Parliament, Mumbai: grenades of same make

The weapons and grenades used by the 10 terrorists who attacked Mumbai last week, investigators claim...

The weapons and grenades used by the 10 terrorists who attacked Mumbai last week, investigators claim, have provided them more evidence of the Pakistan link to the carnage that killed nearly 200 people.

Most of them have their source in Pakistan and some are from the Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF) in Wah city in the north of Pakistan’s Punjab Province — also the source of grenades and explosives used in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, the 2001 Parliament attack and this year’s Kabul embassy attack.

One of the grenades recovered from last week’s attacks, and whose markings were accessed by ‘The Indian Express’, bears the name ‘EN ARGES’ in bold letters, followed by ‘Spl HG 64’ and the serial number 7-93-003. The Arges brandname belongs to Rheinmetall Waffe Munition, an

Austrian company, and the grenades are manufactured by POF under license for use by the Pakistan Army.

Similar grenades were found to have been used or seized from terrorists involved in the 1993 Mumbai serial bomb blasts, the 2001 Parliament attack and on the three militants gunned down while trying to attack the RSS headquarters in Nagpur in June 2006.

As reported first by The Indian Express, explosives used in the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul in July this year were also traced to the same POF complex in Wah by forensic experts of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.

The AK-47 assault rifles used by the terrorists in Mumbai were manufactured in Russia. One rifle recovered has the trademark symbol of a triangle with an arrow inside it, representing the Izhevsk factory in Izhevsk city, capital of the Udmurt Republic in western Russia, where Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the rifle.

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The automatic pistols are also manufactured in Pakistan, with one of them bearing, in bold letters, the name “Diamond” followed by the manufacturer’s name, “Nedi Frontier Arms Co.” Below it are engravings which read “Peshawar Cal 30” and “7341 NFAC.”

The butt of the pistol also has the symbol of a circumscribed star. Knives with black handles have also been recovered and have the image of a black revolver with Arabic or Urdu text next to it on the blades. Meanwhile, sources said the interrogation of Mohammed Ajmal Ameer Kasab, the only attacker caught alive, found that their original plan was to target Mumbai during Eid in the first week of October but it was postponed due to “certain situations”.

“Kasab has revealed that he and the others were originally given instructions to target the city during Eid. However, due to certain reasons and situations, which he is not privy to as he is a foot-soldier, the attack was then delayed,” the source said, adding that the terrorists were constantly in touch with two persons in Pakistan whom they addressed only as “Zaki” and “Kafaa” while they were sailing to India.

Security experts pointed out that the run-up to Eid was marked by two major terror incidents — the attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on September 20 and the Malegaon blast on September 29 — and they could have forced the Mumbai attackers to change their plans in the light of heightened security.