TV Preview: Tom Shales on HBO's riveting documentary "Terror in Mumbai"

Murder may be most foul when random and arbitrary, partly because the murderers may thus be imagining themselves God's equals, entitled to administer the ultimate in verdicts. Such was the character of a callous outbreak of killings in India a year ago by Pakistan-based terrorists, a hellish episode masterfully reconstructed by "Terror in Mumbai," an HBO documentary premiering Thursday night.

The group's leaders have chosen an insanely profane name for themselves: "The Army of the Righteous," a terrorist faction whose leaders openly aspire to increasing the amount of fear in the world. They are not connected with al-Qaeda, they say, but they share much of its jargon and degraded desires.

They would also like to be as widely reviled as al-Qaeda; how's that for lofty ambition? Professing no interest in noble goals, some young men opt instead for the lowliest imaginable. As documented by HBO's one-hour report, the killings were reprehensible in the extreme -- a callous demonstration of raw and arrogant evil.

"We can," the killers seemed to be saying, "therefore we kill." In their fanatical primitivism, they evoke the mythical fiends who rained terror on a much earlier India in the classic adventure movie "Gunga Din," based on the Rudyard Kipling poem. The leader of a notorious horde of thuggees tells his drugged followers to "kill for the love of killing."

As narrated by Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and a fairly frequent contributor to ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," the documentary is remarkably straightforward and without artsy embellishment -- yet also uncommonly powerful. One of its few questionable observations, however, comes in the earliest narration. "The world watched in horror" as the killings took place, Zakaria says, but in retrospect it seems as though the world, and the media, could have paid much more attention at the time, and expressed more horror.

Typically of modern terrorism, this outbreak was a chilling parlay of 21st-century technology and ancient, primal "religious" prejudice -- crimes committed by killers whose language is riddled with references to some mad version of a deity: "God willing," they say over and over on tapes made by Mumbai police, which also capture the terrorists' notion that "God is waiting . . . in heaven" to reward those who commit their sick, savage murders with a happy heart.

"Do it in God's name," a "controller" tells a young man armed with a gun and a grenade, and the foot soldier says, "Pray that God will accept my martyrdom." Martyrdom? To what? It's not clear; only the assignment is clear. "Just shoot them now," the controller tells a young man who is showing a small measure of civilized self-doubt. He is holding hostages at bay with a gun, and the controller is getting impatient. Maybe he has a heavy lunch date.

"Go on, I'm listening, do it!" he shouts into the phone. "What, shoot them?" asks the operative. But of course: "Sit them up and shoot them in the back of the head," he is instructed, the controller listening for reassuring shots. But the young man again expresses a measure of compassion, telling the coward hiding at the other end of the line, "The thing is, Umer [a comrade] is asleep right now. He hasn't been feeling too well."

This is the point at which the controller utters the obscenity "Do it, in God's name" and a loud blast is heard on the phone. The producers went through hours and hours of tapes to piece the horrific story together.

The result, says Zakaria at the outset, is "the first 360-degree view of terrorism"; CNN's Anderson Cooper, we assume, won't object to Zakaria's "borrowing" from the title of his nightly news hour. The audio recordings concentrate on the terrorists' attacks at the Leopold Cafe, the Taj Hotel and a major train depot nicknamed "VT Station" -- as well as other spots where innocent victims were expected to be plentiful.

The sect has been allied since its beginning with the Pakistani military, Zakaria says, but the Pakistani police, though apparently not similarly corrupted, are of little help, at least not early in the assault. The enemy "hoped to plunge the police into chaos" with a multi-pronged attack, Zakaria says, and "they succeeded completely."

The report is both harrowing and heartbreaking, with perhaps the most trenchant observations and memories coming from a 12-year-old Muslim who saw his parents murdered by the marauders. The floor vibrated from the roar of the gunfire, he recalls; "my ears went deaf." His father was shot, and fell dead in front of him, the boy says.

Later he remembers happy times of his youth, when his father took him fishing. "Mom and Dad loved me so much," the boy says. "Thinking about it makes me want to cry." He holds back the tears even while trying to answer an unanswerable question about the attackers: "What harm did we ever do for them to kill so many people?"

One may well have a kind of sympathy for the attackers, however, since they have been relentlessly schooled in mythology about rewards to be showered upon them in the next life. Remember, one slightly reluctant murderer is told, "for your mission to end successfully, you must be killed."

The story told by "Terror in Mumbai" is urgent, frightening, resonant and appalling -- and it is told mercilessly well.

Terror in Mumbai

(one hour) airs Thursday at 8 p.m. on HBO, and repeats through Dec. 11.