We knew this train bombings were going to happen. We already knew that. It was an attack on India, but we didn’t know the precise time from which it would happen. We were living in the middle of one of the last Indian cities that would become the epicenter of the train bombings.
This morning, I went to the Indian railway station at Mumbai’s Shivaji Terminus. I saw a red-and-white striped train that looked suspiciously like a suspiciously-constructed train. I could find no sign of the train, which would have been parked in the tunnel, and I could not find any indication in the station that the train was in service.
When the attacks occurred, they were happening right next to where we lived in Mumbai. There was no indication of this from the station, and we didn’t hear any announcements about the bombings in Mumbai. But our apartment building was the nearest place to get any information, so we decided to wait outside. It was only a few hours before the trains would run again. We couldn’t be quite sure which one it was that would run.
The way the train system works is that once a train is scheduled to run, all trains to that station are informed and they all depart the same minute. So the train that was scheduled to run when the bombings happened might not even be on the platform, but would be at a different station. Its possible that the station next to our building may have had no train at all.
The train bombings happened on the day of the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was the second anniversary of the carnage that occurred when the Twin Towers, World Trade Center, and Pentagon were struck by hijacked airliners and brought down by US Marines. Although this was a terrorist attack on US soil, it happened on a train that travelled through a heavily populated area.
Some people call it a plane crash, but I suspect that the victims were brought down by a suicide bomber. The bombings occurred in the Indian city of Mumbai at a station that was a few blocks away from the Indian embassy. The attacks left at least 41 dead and about 400 injured.
The first plane that slammed into the WTC was an Alenia Aermacchi LZ-60, which was a large, twin-engine turboprop aircraft. It was one of the largest aircraft accidents in the history of aviation, and the deadliest of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The accident was caused by a catastrophic explosion of the fuel tank, which caused the aircraft to spiral into the sea during a sudden change in direction. The US military quickly took over the investigation.
The attack was blamed on several gunmen of the Pakistani-based Islamic militant group Lashar Al-Jihad, which has been linked to al-Qaeda. The attack was the deadliest attack on the world’s major transportation system since the 9/11 attacks.
In the wake of the tragedy, the government of India imposed a ban on train travel on all major cities. It meant that by the time trains could come in to Mumbai, hundreds of people had already been killed. I was curious to learn if there was any connection between the bombings and these security measures.
In 2006 the Indian government took the decision to ban all trains in India and placed a ban on all trains in the entire country. It wasn’t as drastic as closing down all roads and bridges, but it was still a major step in the right direction. The ban also came after the 9/11 attacks that killed over a thousand people in the US. It was an understandable reaction that had to be put in place. The Indian government was determined to prevent another terror attack on their soil.