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Were the Mumbai Terrorists Fueled by Coke?

by Bruce Crum­ley
TIME

Did the jihadists who tore up Mum­bai last week rely on par­ty drugs usu­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with West­ern deca­dence to stay awake and alert through­out their three-day killing spree? Britain’s Tele­graph news­pa­per sug­gests that they did, cit­ing uniden­ti­fied offi­cials claim­ing phys­i­cal evi­dence shows the assailants used cocaine and oth­er stim­u­lants to sus­tain their vio­lent fren­zy. And if the notion of self-anoint­ed holy war­riors on a coke binge sounds incon­gru­ous, the report also main­tains that the killers imbibed the psy­che­del­ic drug LSD while fight­ing advanc­ing secu­ri­ty forces.

“We found injec­tions con­tain­ing traces of cocaine and LSD left behind by the ter­ror­ists, and lat­er found drugs in their blood,” the Tele­graph was told by one offi­cial, whose nation­al­i­ty and rela­tion to the inves­ti­ga­tion were not spec­i­fied. “This explains why they man­aged to bat­tle the com­man­dos for over 50 hours with no food or sleep.” (See the ter­ror­ism in Mum­bai.)

The hal­lu­cino­genic and sen­so­ry-dis­tort­ing effects of LSD make it an unlike­ly com­bat drug, even for kamikaze assailants who were, after all, seek­ing to kill as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble before their own inevitable death. But the sug­ges­tion that the Mum­bai jihadists may have amped them­selves up on stim­u­lants typ­i­cal­ly for­bid­den by their strict Salafist brand of Islam strikes some experts as plau­si­ble, par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in the twist­ed jihadist log­ic in which holy ends jus­ti­fy impi­ous means.

“We’ve nev­er seen instances of oper­a­tives using drugs in attacks before, but we’ve also nev­er seen the kind of open-end­ed, insur­gent-style strike of civil­ian tar­gets by Islamists pri­or to Mum­bai,” says Jean-Louis Bruguière, who retired this year as France’s chief coun­tert­er­ror­ism inves­ti­ga­tor to take a top post in the transat­lantic Ter­ror­ist Finance Track­ing Pro­gram. Bruguière had no infor­ma­tion to con­firm or deny the report­ed cocaine binge by the Mum­bai assailants, but he believes that dis­count­ing it out of hand would be naive.

“Why would­n’t attack­ers do some­thing for­bid­den by their reli­gious prac­tice — to take drugs or any­thing else — that could help them achieve what they con­sid­er the far more impor­tant goal of their plot in strik­ing a blow for God?” Bruguière asks. “Adepts of the Tak­fir wal-Hijra sect will adopt what Islam con­sid­ers impure behav­ior of ene­my soci­eties, like drink­ing alco­hol, eat­ing pork and wild liv­ing, to bet­ter pre­pare attacks for those same soci­eties. That’s what Mohamed Atta and the oth­er 9/11 attack­ers did while plot­ting in the U.S. If ter­ror­ists feel jihad jus­ti­fies impi­ous acts to pre­pare strikes, why would­n’t that ratio­nal­iza­tion also apply to car­ry­ing attacks out?”

Inde­pen­dent French ter­ror­ism expert Roland Jacquard is a lit­tle more skep­ti­cal of the report, how­ev­er, at least as far as it claimed some of the fight­ers had used nar­cotics to numb them­selves to pain as death approached. Though he under­stands the strate­gic log­ic of assailants using stim­u­lants to over­come fatigue as their attack wears on — con­ven­tion­al armies, includ­ing the U.S. mil­i­tary, have used stim­u­lants to counter com­bat fatigue — he does not believe the stern Salafist pro­hi­bi­tion of soporifics would be ignored as the end loomed.

“We’re talk­ing about peo­ple who think they’re killing for God and who are cer­tain they’ll attain par­adise by slay­ing inno­cent peo­ple. The most pow­er­ful drug they could ever find is already in their head before the attack starts,” says Jacquard. “There’s a very strong antidrug cul­ture among Salafists — most don’t even use tobac­co. And extrem­ists with any drug expe­ri­ence usu­al­ly say Islam is what allowed them escape it.”

The Tele­graph sto­ry also quotes an offi­cial say­ing traces of steroids had been found in the blood­streams of Mum­bai attack­ers — some­thing the unnamed source says “isn’t uncom­mon in ter­ror­ists.” If so, it’s a well-kept secret that runs counter to jihadists’ dis­dain of exter­nal “impu­ri­ties” being used to attain phys­i­cal fit­ness they often extol. But for Bruguière, wran­gling over those kinds of details is sim­ply a coun­ter­pro­duc­tive attempt to cre­ate a pre­cise, pre­dictable stereo­type of a ter­ror­ist in what is, in fact, a diverse, rapid­ly chang­ing, amor­phous milieu of extrem­ists. (Read Mum­bai’s Ter­ror Is Over, but Pan­ic Per­sists.)

“It’s now clear the Mum­bai group was con­nect­ed to the Pak­istan-sup­port­ed Lashkar-e-Tai­ba, but it takes a while before we know how close and struc­tured that rela­tion­ship was and how much auton­o­my the attack­ing unit was oper­at­ing with,” Bruguière says. “LeT is keen to export its fight through­out the region and world but will do so in loose rela­tion­ships with myr­i­ad extrem­ist move­ments out there. Some will use car explo­sions, oth­ers kamikaze bombers, and oth­ers insur­gent ter­ror­ists who — just maybe — decide to use drugs to keep their strike going longer. If we want to pre­pare for the way we may be attacked next, we have to start con­sid­er­ing all the ways we haven’t been attacked yet, as well as the ones we know.”

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