ASIA: Terrified guests recount night of horror in hotel
27 Nov 2008 12:46 PM
MUMBAI, Nov 27, AFP - It's one of the plushest hotels in India, if not the world, but for one night it became a terrifying battleground, complete with gun battles, explosions and a raging fire.
"That was, without doubt, the worst experience of my entire life," said one woman guest after she was rescued by firemen from Mumbai's famed Taj Hotel, which was caught in the middle of a multi-pronged militant attack across India's financial capital.
"It was a very, very painful six hours," said the woman, who had laid on the floor of a hotel room with 25 other petrified guests, while hostage-taking gunmen roamed the hotel and fought off special units of naval commandos.
"We really didn't know what was going on," she told reporters.
"But we could hear the army coming through the hotel. We heard the firing and the blasts."
Military units stormed the hotel in the early hours of Thursday morning to confront a handful of gunmen armed with assault rifles and grenades who had taken hostage an unknown number of guests -- many of them foreigners.
During the encounter a huge fire broke out at the top of the hotel's historic old wing, trapping numerous guests in their rooms.
"In the end the firemen broke the windows of the room and we climbed down the ladder," the woman said.
One British guest told local Indian television that he had been among a dozen people herded together by two of the gunmen and taken up to the hotel's upper floors.
"They were very young, like boys really, wearing jeans and t-shirts," the guest said.
"They said they wanted anyone with British and American passports and then they took us up the stairs. I think they wanted to take us to the roof," he said, adding that he and another hostage managed to escape on the 18th floor.
A group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedeen claimed responsibility for the coordinated assaults on the Taj and another luxury hotel, the Trident, as well as several other locations in the city.
As of 6:00am (1130 AEDT) there were still gunmen holed up in the Taj and for some remaining guests the danger was far from over.
One woman contacted on her phone by a television channel, said she and around 35 other guests were boarded up inside one of the rooms.
"We were shot at and we have one man who has a bullet wound in his stomach," she whispered over the phone. "He's bleeding badly and he needs to go to hospital."
The woman said the security forces had been in contact with her group during the night.
"They've been telling us to stay quiet and lay low," she said. "I think they're waiting for light to break."
Another Taj guest said he got out from the 18th floor via the fire escape.
"There was a lot of smoke so I couldn't see well, but I could hear bomb sounds," he said.
"I could hear other guests in their rooms. I tried knocking on some of the doors, but none of them opened," he said.
The head of the Madrid government and a British member of the European Parliament were inside when the gunmen attacked the Taj but escaped unhurt.
"All I saw was one man on foot carrying a machine gun-type of weapon -- which I then saw him firing from and I saw people hitting the floor, people right next to me," MEP Sajjad Karim was quoted as saying by the BBC.
The Taj sits opposite the landmark Gateway of India monument on the edge of the Arabian Sea through which the last colonial British troops departed after independence in 1947.
Legend has it that its creator, a Parsi industrialist called Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, commissioned the building after being refused entry to the now-defunct Apollo Hotel, which had a strict Europeans-only policy.
Completed in 1903, it quickly became the city's best hotel and has arguably retained that accolade to the present day, as well as an iconic place in Mumbaikers' hearts as a symbol of cosmopolitan sophistication.
