 | « Back to article | Print this article |
Days before the first anniversary of the Mumbai terrorist attack, a top American university has started a blog on the horrific terrorist attack: 'Sixty Hours of Terror: Ten Gunmen, Ten Minutes.'
'Sixty Hours of Terror: Ten Gunmen, Ten Minutes' -- a serial blog running on Virginia University's Virginia Quarterly Review Website -- covers the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that had sent shockwaves across the world a year ago.
The University's alumnus Jason Motlagh, who graduated in 2004, made multiple trips to Mumbai, interviewed survivors, pored over pages and pages of police records, reports in the Indian media and transcripts of intercepted phone communications between the gunmen and their handlers, and watched videos from closed-circuit security cameras.
The online report is more than 19,000 words and features 24 unpublished photographs of the attacks and its aftermath. His work fills in the absence of 'a single, thorough account of what exactly had happened on those fateful days', editor Ted Genoways said in the introduction.
Genoways said publishing Motlagh's 'amazing piece of original journalism' was a milestone for VQR. "We soon hit upon the idea of something that would be closer to literary nonfiction than traditional journalism --- or even 'new journalism'.
"This would not be the story of Jason's journey in the wake of disaster, but a straightforward narrative of what happened in Mumbai," Genoways said.
The first installment recounts the attacks at five sites in the city and describes the 'Army of the Pure' or the Lashkar-e-Tayiba behind these and other fatal attacks, where dozens of people have been killed and hundreds injured.
The terror group claims it wants to 'liberate' Kashmir from India and expand an Islamic state, including Pakistan.