They came wearing black hoods, firing automatic weapons and throwing grenades. They took hostages and attacked two hotels, a movie theater, a café, a train station and other popular and undefended “soft targets.”
Who are they? The answer to that question remained in dispute Thursday as security officials and experts attempted to untangle the few clues as to the attackers’ likely identity.
All we know, they claimed them self 'Deccan Mujahideen'.

Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. But the combination of the two, said Sajjan Gohel, a security analyst in London, is a “front name. This group is nonexistent.”

Some global terrorism experts with experience in South Asia said that, based on the tactics used in the attacks, the group was probably not linked to Al Qaeda — although that assertion was challenged by other experts.

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, Another violent South Asian terrorist group.“There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the attack. “Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage-taking and they don’t do grenades.”

Ms. Fair said one incident — “a watershed event” — that continues to anger Muslims were the riots that swept Gujarat State near Mumbai in 2002. The violence killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people, most of them Muslims. “There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India,” she said, “The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.”

The public political face of India says, “Our Muslims have not been radicalized.’ But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad,” she said. “Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. “Al Qaeda’s in your toilet!’ But this is a domestic issue.


This is not India’s 9/11.”Mark McDonald reported from Hong Kong; Alan Cowell from Paris; Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt, Germany; and Salman Masood from Islamabad.