From Time
By Bruce Crumley

Did the jihadists who tore up Mumbai last week rely on party drugs usually associated with Western decadence to stay awake and alert throughout their three-day killing spree? Britain’s Telegraph newspaper suggests that they did, citing unidentified officials claiming physical evidence shows the assailants used cocaine and other stimulants to sustain their violent frenzy. And if the notion of self-anointed holy warriors on a coke binge sounds incongruous, the report also maintains that the killers imbibed the psychedelic drug LSD while fighting advancing security forces.

“We found injections containing traces of cocaine and LSD left behind by the terrorists, and later found drugs in their blood,” the Telegraph was told by one official, whose nationality and relation to the investigation were not specified. “This explains why they managed to battle the commandos for over 50 hours with no food or sleep.” (See the terrorism in Mumbai.)

The hallucinogenic and sensory-distorting effects of LSD make it an unlikely combat drug, even for kamikaze assailants who were, after all, seeking to kill as many people as possible before their own inevitable death. But the suggestion that the Mumbai jihadists may have amped themselves up on stimulants typically forbidden by their strict Salafist brand of Islam strikes some experts as plausible, particularly within the twisted jihadist logic in which holy ends justify impious means.

“We’ve never seen instances of operatives using drugs in attacks before, but we’ve also never seen the kind of open-ended, insurgent-style strike of civilian targets by Islamists prior to Mumbai,” says Jean-Louis Bruguière, who retired this year as France’s chief counterterrorism investigator to take a top post in the transatlantic Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. Bruguière had no information to confirm or deny the reported cocaine binge by the Mumbai assailants, but he believes that discounting it out of hand would be naive.

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