Perfect Storm

On the night of November 26, 2008, ten men came ashore in Mumbai from the sea. Over the next 60 hours their violence brought India's financial capital to a standstill and shocked the world. This book argues that the story of the attack begins decades earlier, crosses several continents and involves a wide cast of people with very different motives. It traces the plot back to the violent birth of Pakistan in 1947 and follows it through the volatile geopolitics of the years after 9/11. The account moves between settings as different as dusty training camps in rural Pakistan and neon-lit hacker dens in South-East Asia, and it presents the 26/11 attack as a state-sponsored operation. Prabhakar Aloka spent decades in counter-terrorism with the Intelligence Bureau, and co-author Nikhil Ravi is a screenwriter and filmmaker who has documented Indo-Pak geopolitical flashpoints. Together they draw on detailed research to lay out the whole network behind the attack, the story they say has never been told in full.