Four years after he lost his soldiers in the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks, the man who led the operations against the terrorists is pained and relieved after Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole surviving gunman of the three-day siege, was executed on Wednesday in a Pune jail.
“I am happy that he finally got the punishment for the crime he had committed,” was the first reaction of Brigadier (retd) Govind Singh Sisodia, former deputy inspector general in the National Security Guard (NSG), who led his commandos to flush out terrorists from Taj Mahal Hotel and Nariman House in Mumbai.
But he is pained for the NSG commandos and other security personnel who were killed in the attacks.
“There was some delay in Kasab’s execution but we have managed to convince the world that Pakistan was involved in the terror attacks,” Brigadier Sisodia, who hails from Chopal in Shimla district, told IANS.
Brigadier Sisodia played an important role in the successful completion of the 47-hour counter offensive operation.
“Had he been hanged in haste, we couldn’t have convinced the world that Pakistan is involved in terrorist activities. Even Pakistan had to accept that terrorists are trained in its soil,” Brigadier Sisodia, who is currently working with a multinational company, said.
“Though Kasab was just a Class IV passout, he was intelligent. He was sharp. When I showed him a photo of Hotel Taj and asked him about it, he said he collected the information about the hotel from Google Earth,” Sisodia, who interrogated Kasab, said.
“Most of the educated people in India are not familiar about Google Earth but he was familiar about its usage. This shows his sharpness,” he said.
Brigadier Sisodia, who still has fresh memories about the counter-offensive operation, said: “My visit to Hotel Taj and Nariman House is always emotional. I prefer to visit quietly, but I am regularly visiting the places where my comrades sacrificed their lives.”
He was deployed in Sri Lanka to fight the Tamil Tigers in 1987 and was injured after being shot in his arm. He also led operations against militants in Kashmir.