The Hindu : Front Page : Those tense hours

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Friday, Nov 28, 2008
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Those tense hours

MUMBAI/MELBOURNE: The young gunmen roaming the corridors of two luxury hotels in Mumbai were shooting wildly, but they knew exactly what sort of guests they intended to take hostage.

“They told everybody to stop and put their hands up and asked if there were any British or Americans,” Alex Chamberlain, a British guest at the Trident hotel, said after fleeing his captors via a fire escape. “My friend said to me, ‘don’t be a hero, don’t say you are British.’”

Mr. Chamberlain told TV reporters he and other guests had been herded together by the gunmen and taken up to the upper floors of the hotel.

Rakesh Patel, a guest at the Taj, said that “they were after foreigners, because they were asking for British or American passports.”

“They came from the restaurant and took us up the stairs,” Mr.Patel, a British citizen based in Hong Kong, told NDTV, his face blackened by smoke. “They were very young, like boys really, wearing jeans and T-shirts,” he said, adding that he and another hostage managed to escape on the 18th floor.

One Taj guest related how she lay on the floor of one room with 25 other petrified people as gunmen fought special commandos. “That was, without doubt, the worst experience of my entire life,” she told journalists. “It was a very, very painful six hours.”

“We could hear the army coming through the hotel. We heard the firing and the blasts. In the end the firemen broke the windows of the room and we climbed down the ladder.”

Backpacker Steve Loschko, 30, from Minnesota, said he saw a man standing on the roof above the penthouse suites of the Taj around 1-30 a.m. and shouting “Help me, help me” to firefighters.

Actor’s trauma

An Australian TV actress, who was trapped inside the Taj, hid herself in a cupboard for an hour to escape death.

Brooke Satchwell, former star of soap opera ‘Neighbours,’ told a radio portal that she was inside the ground-floor toilets when the attack happened and “everyone just froze.”

“As I stepped into the bathroom you could hear machine-gun fire start up in the lobby,” she told the radio portal.

“People started locking themselves into the toilet cubicles, which clearly wasn’t a very good idea. But we were trying to find somewhere to hide,” she said.

Ms. Satchwell, along with her boyfriend and about eight other foreigners, has now been moved to another hotel in south Mumbai, whose location was not disclosed for security reasons.

The actress said hotel staff directed the group into the service cupboard, where she waited, hearing bursts of gunfire.

“Some of the hotel security came and ushered us very quickly down the corridor and across the lobby. Clearly no one had a very good idea of what happened ... or where we were meant to be heading at that stage,” she said.

At least 20 Australians were in the nearby Trident hotel, which also came under attack. All of them were members of a New South Wales delegation organised by the Department of State and Regional Development.

Meanwhile, an Australian bride, Chloe Papazahariakis, who had just moved to Mumbai, Chloe Papazahariakis told the Nine Network that Mumbai was in “total lockdown.” “I’ve just moved to this beautiful city to marry my husband in four days and I’ve got about 20 friends here for the wedding in the midst of all this chaos,” she said. — Agencies

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