For terrorists, targeting India is a very easy proposition: Experts

Ottawa, Nov.28 : A former security official with Israel's El Al Airlines has said that for terrorists wanting to target India is a very easy proposition.

Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper quoted Leo Gleser as saying that: "It's a very soft target. It's very easy to target India."

Gleser, who runs the security consulting firm ISDS further went on to say: "Hotels, malls, railway stations, you have so many soft targets in India. They're not hard to find."

"The Indian economy has grown a lot faster than the ability of its security forces," said Andrew Black, a counter-terrorism analyst who runs the risk-management consultancy Black Watch Global.

Former senior British intelligence official Nigel Inkster, who is now director of transnational threats at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: "A determined group of people are always going to be able to get through once, maybe twice. In the U.K. for example, in the 1990s, the security service had very good coverage of the Provisional IRA but that did not provide a guarantee against attacks on the U.K. mainland."

India is a large democracy with a substantial Muslim population that can be exploited by fundamentalists in volatile regions such as Kashmir and Assam, and unfriendly neighbours such as Pakistan, the experts said.

Gleser noted that the attackers brought enough ammunition to fight security forces for more than 24 hours. Black was struck by the group's willingness to lose several trained fighters rather than rely on low-skilled suicide bombers.

"The ability to capture people and derive information from them is going to be very important and that's quite an interesting development," said Inkster.

ANI