By Kavita Mistry 
By now it is clear that the six doctors from the Al Falah University planned to carry out India’s worst terrorist blasts since the March 12, 1993 Mumbai serial bombings.
The plan, according to investigators, was to drive dozens of vehicle-borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs) packed with ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosives across cities and detonated, killing thousands of innocent citizens.
One bomber — Dr Mohammad Umar Nabi— got away, detonating a VBIED near the Red Fort on November 10 killing 12 persons. For over two years, the module comprising radicalised professionals that Dr Umar was part of, had planned to carry out deadly serial blasts in Delhi-NCR and other cities. If alert policemen in Jammu and Kashmir hadn’t linked the module to posters praising Jaish-e-Mohammed in Srinagar in late October 2025, India would likely have witnessed a chilling replay of the 1993 Mumbai bombings.
In over two hours of a warm Friday afternoon on March 12, a dozen parked cars and scooters packed with military-grade RDX exploded in a precisely coordinated sequence across prominent Mumbai landmarks— the Stock Exchange, the diamond market, the regional passport office, the Air India headquarters and a 5 star hotel— killing 257 innocent civilians and wounding over 1400.
The Pakistan Army’s ISI used Dawood Ibrahim’s crime syndicate to execute a lethal three-phase plan to cripple India’s economic capital. The Pakistan Army supplied the military-grade RDX manufactured by Wah Nobel industries in Rawalpindi. The explosive, one and a half times more powerful than TNT, created blast waves which could shatter concrete, metal and flesh. RDX was designed for use in artillery shells, mines and aerial bombs. Shipped from Karachi by a merchant vessel and offloaded on the Maharashtra coast, the explosive was brought into Ibrahim Mushtaq ‘Tiger’ Memon’s house in Al Husseini building in Mahim. Here, the bombs were fabricated and packed into 5 cars, three Jeeps and three scooters, converting them into VBIEDs which were then parked near the Mumbai landmarks.
Phase 2 and 3 of the 1993 blasts was for Dawood’s henchmen to storm state government building in gun and grenade attacks. Phase 3 was for large-scale communal riots in the city where assault rifles and grenades would be distributed in Muslim majority areas of the city. The latter two phases were abandoned when Dawood’s henchmen panicked and fled after the bombings. Still, the 1993 bombings remain a chilling how-to of spreading urban mayhem.
The Faridabad module had stockpiled nearly three tonnes of explosive material including Ammonium Nitrate and had begun buying a series of motor vehicles. Dubbed the poor man’s TNT, Ammonium Nitrate is a low-cost, low-density secondary explosive with moderate energy. It is only 85 per cent as powerful as TNT and only half as powerful as RDX. As with all such ‘fertiliser bombs’ packed in trucks and cars for maximum impact, the plotters hoped to achieve with quantity what they lacked in quality.
The J&K and Haryana police’s November 10 windfall in Faridabad would have been the equivalent of the Mumbai police raiding Memon’s house and discovering multiple vehicles with explosives. The difference of course being that the Mumbai police failed to prevent the bombings.
NIA investigators will now work on gathering evidence about the module and the role of external actors like the Jaish-e-Mohammed in planning the attacks.
Coordinated serial bombings are dead giveaways of military planning and the involvement of state actors. The planning for the 1993 attacks was done by the Pakistan Army’s ISI. The ISI then was headed by the odious Lt General Javed Nasir. Nasir was also a member of the Tablighi Jamat, a conservative Islamic missionary group. He was dubbed ‘Jehadi General’ by Indian investigators for his Islamist views and close links with global insurgents.
‘General Nasir had pushed ISI in a direction that, as one U.S. participant put it, you’ve crossed the red line into making Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism,’ says Prof Owen Sirrs, author of a definitive 2016 book ‘Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate’
Captured 1993 bomb planters told their Mumbai police interrogators how after each visit to Pakistan, Tiger Memon, began speaking like a military commander, reeling out precise targeting instructions. He was clearly being briefed from his bosses in Pakistan. Memon remains in Karachi, one of India’s most wanted fugitives. In 2025, tracing the unseen Pakistani hand to the doctors plot will be the clincher.
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