Famous

On the night of November 26, 2008, two men walked into Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, India, and started shooting and throwing grenades into the crowds of travelers "indiscriminately," as reported in the official Indian account of the attack. In a railway station that accommodates two million passengers every day, a place where one can hardly stand during peak hours without being swept into a river of people, they couldn't very well have missed. In minutes the dead and dying lay throughout the concourse, their limbs splayed in grotesque postures, and blood pooled on the station's concrete floor.

The younger of the two, twenty-one-year-old Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, a native of the Punjab region of Pakistan, became famous when pictures of him taken during and after the attack circulated in the media. Sebastian D'Souza, a photographer with the Mumbai Mirror, was in the office that night when he heard gunfire from the train station and ran across the street with a camera. He ducked into a train standing at one of the platforms while the two gunmen stalked the concourse, taking turns shooting and reloading as they went.

"They were like angels of death," said D'Souza. "When they hit someone they didn't even look back. They were so sure."

To get a better angle, D'Souza moved across the platform into another waiting train and, trying to keep his hands from shaking, took a few frames with a telephoto lens as the two men crossed his line of vision. They probably saw him taking pictures, he said, but "didn't seem to care," or else they saw him as an opportunity to gain some cheap celebrity as young jihadists. People who never would have paid any attention to them otherwise would come to know and say their names.

In D'Souza's photograph, Ajmal Kasab is seen in profile walking through the station, an AK-47 assault rifle held in his right hand, a duffel slung over his left shoulder—everything he needed to stay alive and keep on fighting "to the last breath," as he characterized his mission later under questioning. His commanders in Pakistan had ordered him and the other nine to kill as many people as they could before being killed themselves. Although escape routes had been entered into a GPS unit later recovered by police, escape was not an acceptable outcome according to the terms of his contract, and capture was unthinkable.

The young man in the photograph is more attractive than he has any right to be: the boyish bangs, the proud chin, the jaunty stride, the expression intensely alert but not discernibly fearful or malicious. His evident excitement might be that of an exchange student on his own in a foreign country for the first time—in fact it was the first time he had left his native country—carrying everything he needs for a year abroad (replace the Kalashnikov with a cricket bat and you get an entirely different picture). He wears running shoes, gray cargo pants, a dark blue Versace T-shirt. There's a waterproof watch on his left wrist, and on his right wrist, the hand holding the rifle, he wears a red-and-yellow mauli, the yarn bracelet offered at Hindu temples in exchange for alms, meant to keep the wearer safe from harm.

At least three other photographs of Kasab circulated in the media soon after the attacks, though none as widely as D'Souza's—two stills from closed-circuit television cameras and one of Kasab in the hospital after he was captured; he was the only one of the ten terrorists who survived battles with police and security forces. One of the television images, very unlike D'Souza's photo, is of a young man with an expression of exaggerated malice, as if meant to conform to a popular idea of how a terrorist might look in the act of killing—a comic-book villain.

Then there was the photo taken in the hospital, in which Kasab is lying down, looking up at the camera. His face is...