MA: When we were getting into the boat, the waves were quite high. Another boat came. Everyone raised the alarm that the navy had come. In the confusion, [team captain Abu] Ismail’s satellite phone got left behind.

Kasab was arrested at Girgaum Chowpatty on the night of 26 November, while his buddy, Ismail, who was also the leader of the ten-man Lashkar team in Mumbai, subsequently succumbed to bullet injuries received in a desperate encounter with policemen and officers of the D.B. Marg police station. Assistant Sub-Inspector Tukaram Ombale attained martyrdom while overpowering Kasab. Kasab and Ismail were travelling in a stolen Skoda car after killing three senior police officers in an ambush in the lane adjoining St Xavier’s College near Azad Maidan in south Mumbai.

Ismail was the man who had earlier handled the sole satellite phone given by the Pakistani Lashkar commanders to the ten-man fidayeen team for communication purposes. He was among the three fidayeen added to the Mumbai attack team at the last minute and was suspected of being a Pakistani naval commando. The ten-man team was selected from a specially selected group of thirty-two trained Lashkar suicide attackers, for which, the CTC later realized, Abu-Muzammil had approached Atharv as well for prepaid SIM cards.

The LeT attack team had its sea route to Mumbai from Karachi marked on the GPS sets its members were carrying. When the gunmen began their journey on 22 November, they activated their GPS sets in the sea at a point named Man on Board (MOB), which was around twenty kilometres southwest of Kajhar Creek in Keti Bunder, Pakistan. MOB is roughly 130 kilometres southeast of Karachi. The original route ran close to the Indian coastline, and Ismail, as the team leader, took a call to intervene. He discarded the route and charted a new route that was around eighty kilometres off the Indian coastline to evade detection. The terrorists’ GPS sets showed the culmination of their journey to be at Budhwar Park in Cuffe Parade in south Mumbai, from where they could hire cabs to reach their destinations.

Lashkar recruit Abu Ammar, a native of Beed in Maharashtra, had been used by Abu-Lakhvi to train the team members in picking up the nuances of colloquial Hindi and Marathi and on how to talk on Indian electronic channels during the siege they were going to lay at the targeted spots.

Kasab’s interrogations by CTC would reveal that the ten-man team had left Karachi in a small boat around 8 a.m. on 22 November 2008. Forty minutes later, they had transferred to a bigger boat, the Abu-Lakhvi-owned ‘Al Husseini’, which was carrying seven senior Lashkar commanders.

The next day at 3 p.m., they seized an Indian fishing trawler, the MV Kuber. Its four crew members were moved to Al Husseini while its captain, Amar Singh Solanki, was kept on board to navigate the trawler to Mumbai. The four crewmen were later killed and dumped in the sea by the Lashkar team.