By Yaroslav Trofimov, Geeta Anand, Peter Wonacott and Matthew Rosenberg
Orlando Sentinel
Reprinted from the Wall Stree Journal 
Full News Report

MUMBAI — As waiters started setting dinner in Mumbai's luxurious hotels, the killings that would ravage this Indian metropolis began out of sight, in the muddy waters of the Arabian Sea.

(AP Photo)

In the dusk hours of Wednesday, fisherman Chandrakant Tare was sailing about 100 yards from a fishing trawler when he spotted young men killing a sailor on board. Assuming he had stumbled upon pirates, he sped away.

Hours later, at least 10 terrorists, having arrived by small craft on the shores of Mumbai, began to sow death and destruction at will across India's financial capital.

Pieced together from interviews with dozens of witnesses and officials, this account of the three days of the battle for Mumbai shows how a small but ruthless group of skilled militants, attacking multiple targets in quick succession, managed to bring one of the world's largest cities to its knees.

About 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, one dinghy with half a dozen men landed at a fishing harbor near the southern tip of the Mumbai peninsula, witnesses say; a second arrived nearby shortly after.

Mostly in their early- to mid-20s, the men came ashore wearing dark clothes and hauling heavy bags and backpacks, according to fisherman Ajay Mestry, who saw one of the landings. The group he saw split up and raced toward the city.

The slaughter begins

Mumbai's attention that night was focused on one of the country's favorite sports: cricket. India was playing England and beating its old colonial master. In the open-air Leopold Cafe, customers were watching the match.

About 9:30 p.m., two gunmen with assault rifles appeared on the sidewalk, witnesses said. One stood at the entrance, the second to his left. They started firing.

Minutes later they walked away, leaving more than a dozen casualties.

About the same time, two other gunmen arrived at a gas station at the corner of a small alley that leads to Chabad House, also known as Nariman House, the local headquarters of the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish movement.

With its small, faded sign, the five-story Chabad House is so hard to find that most visitors ask for directions at the gas station. But the militants knew their way, a station attendant says: They threw a hand grenade into the station and walked into the alley.

Alarmed by the explosion, Chabad House's rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, called the Israeli Consulate. The two gunmen burst into his building, taking a number of Israelis, a young Mexican Jewish woman and the rabbi and his family hostage. It appears they quickly shot dead one of the guests. About the same time about a mile north at Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminus, Mumbai's monumental colonial-era train station, two gunmen hauling heavy backpacks walked down Platform 13, which opens into a large hall fringed by a fast-food outlet.

Throwing a grenade into the crowd, they unloaded volleys of gunfire. Bullets flew through the window where the station's manager observed the hall; he ducked and survived. A colleague was cut down as he crossed the concourse.

The two gunmen moved along separate paths toward the station's main entrance, firing as they walked. They met virtually no resistance, even though several dozen police officers are usually deployed at the station. "They were killing the public, and the police just ran away," says Ram Vir, who sells coffee near Platform 8.

B.S. Sidhu, head of the Railway Protection Force for the Mumbai region, says that while some officers tried to fight back, there was little his force could do. Most police officers at the station -- as they are throughout India -- were unarmed or carried only bamboo sticks. More than 40 people, including three police officers, were killed in just a few minutes, authorities said. The wounded survivors screamed for help amid acrid smoke and piles of slumped, bloodied bodies.

By then, shooting had begun in two other spots: Mumbai's most luxurious hotels. The historic Taj Mahal Palace & Tower and a complex housing both the Oberoi and Trident hotels rise high above the sea on opposite sides of the southern tip of Mumbai.

'Why are you doing this to us?'

About 9:45 p.m., two gunmen ran up the driveway at the entrance to the Trident. They shot the security guard and two bellhops. The hotel had metal detectors, but none of its security personnel carried weapons because of the difficulties in obtaining gun permits from the Indian government, according to the hotel company's chairman, P.R.S. Oberoi. The gunmen raced through the marble-floored lobby into the adjoining Verandah restaurant, firing at guests and shattering windows.

At the end of the lobby, they burst into the Opium Den bar, shooting dead a hotel staff member. Then they ran after a group of guests who tried to escape through a rear service area. They killed them, too.

The gunmen returned to the Verandah, climbed a staircase, dashed down a corridor lined with shops to the swanky Tiffin Restaurant in The Oberoi hotel.

They killed four of six friends who live in south Mumbai and had just settled down at a table near the front door. The men fired at point-blank range into anyone who moved before rushing upstairs to an Indian restaurant called Kandahar.

Restaurant workers there ushered guests closest to the kitchen inside.

The assailants jumped in front of another group that tried to run out the door. They corralled 16 diners and led them up to the 20th floor. One man in the group dialed his wife in London and told her he had been taken hostage but was OK. "Everybody drop your phones," one of the assailants shouted, apparently overhearing.

On the 20th floor, the gunmen shoved the group out of the stairwell, lined them up and lifted their weapons. "Why are you doing this to us?" a man called out. "We haven't done anything to you."

"Remember Babri Masjid?" one of the gunmen shouted, referring to a 16th-century mosque built by India's first Mughal Muslim emperor and destroyed by Hindu radicals in 1992.

"Remember Godhra?" the second attacker asked, a reference to the town in the Indian state of Gujarat where religious rioting that evolved into an anti-Muslim pogrom began in 2002.

"We are Turkish. We are Muslim," someone in the group screamed. One of the gunmen motioned for two Turks in the group to step aside.

Then they pointed their weapons at the rest and squeezed the triggers.

At the vaunted Taj hotel across the peninsula, two terrorists arrived from their attack on the Leopold Cafe by about 9:45 p.m., broke down a side door and entered the building, according to a police officer.

Two others entered the hotel's modern lobby, opened fire and threw grenades. As guests dashed for cover, the two pairs united. They would keep Indian police and commandos at bay for 60 more hours as they rampaged through the building.

Police badly outgunned

Uptown, the two gunmen who had attacked the train station -- recorded by the station's surveillance cameras -- reached the nearby Cama Hospital for women and children, authorities said, shooting dead two unarmed guards and racing up the stairs. By then, news of the attacks had spread in the neighborhood. A number of policemen ran into the hospital as nurses herded expectant mothers into one room and locked themselves inside.

On the top floor, terrorists and police traded fire, but the police were badly outgunned. The gunmen escaped down the stairs, into a narrow alley.

In the alley, the state of Maharashtra's antiterrorism chief, Hemant Karkare, sat in a police sport utility vehicle packed with fellow officers, trying to coordinate a response to the mayhem engulfing the city. Creeping up, the two militants sprayed the vehicle with gunfire. The officers appear to have died before any had a chance to fire back.

The two militants jumped into the SUV and sped toward the Metro Big Cinemas multiplex. As they passed journalists and onlookers, the SUV slowed, a gun barrel emerged from the window, and bullets started to fly. Then, the vehicle sped on, with another police vehicle in hot pursuit. At one point, the gunmen ditched the SUV and hijacked a Skoda. Two hours later, they ran into a large police roadblock.

Skidding to a halt 30 feet away from the roadblock, the Skoda's driver blinded the police with high beams, and flipping wipers, began spraying fluid on the windshield so that officers couldn't see into the car, one of the officers said.

The three policemen armed with guns drew them. The nine others waved their bamboo sticks. Revving the engine, the car tried to U-turn but got stuck on the median. The man in the passenger seat rolled out and started shooting, killing one officer and wounding another. The surviving baton-wielding officers jumped on him, knocking him unconscious. Policemen with guns shot the driver dead.

Fires spread

Back at the Taj about 11 p.m., K.R. Ramamoorthy heard men in the corridor knock on his sixth-floor room. "Room service," one of them called out in English.

Silence.

"Shoe polish," the same voice called out.

Ramamoorthy moved to the bathroom, accidentally banging the door.

The two gunmen blasted the door's lock. They tied his hands and feet, he says. Then they ordered him to kneel on the ground. "I'm 69 years old. I have high-blood pressure. Please let me go," he recalls begging.

"We'll leave you; we'll let you go," one man replied.

During the next hour or two, the two men spoke on their mobile phones in his room, seeming relaxed and happy, Ramamoorthy says. Then, two more gunmen showed up in the room, dragging four other hostages -- all uniformed hotel staff.

Minutes later, pushing the five hostages in front of them, the gunmen descended the staircase to a fifth-floor room. They shoved the hostages inside, laid them face down on the floor, and left.

Ramamoorthy says he managed to free his hands and untied the others.

By now, a fire possibly started by a grenade explosion was spreading through the sixth floor of the Taj. As the choking smoke from the blazing fire enveloped the room, one of the four hotel staffers ripped off curtains and bedsheets, improvising a rope. The staffers used the rope to shimmy down the balcony outside to the third-floor ledge.

Certain he didn't have the strength to follow suit, Ramamoorthy backtracked and descended via the smoke-filled staircase to the third floor. Some time later, he noticed the glare of searchlights.

He opened the window and waved and shouted. Firefighters saw him and lifted a ladder to the window. "You are safe," he says they told him.

As the fires burned through the hotel during the night, the general manager was busy shepherding hotel guests to safety. He didn't manage to rescue his own wife and two young children: They died in the blaze.

In the other hotel complex, The Oberoi-Trident, gunmen returned to the 20th floor about 6 a.m. Thursday. They pulled out their phones and filmed the sprawled bodies of executed diners.

Commandos finally arrive

At 6.30 a.m. Thursday, commandos from India's National Security Guard finally arrived -- after they first waited for hours while authorities located a plane to pick them up at New Delhi, then waited for transportation from Mumbai's airport to the hotels under attack. The NSG commandos had proper equipment and training. They surrounded the Taj and The Oberoi complex and a prolonged siege began.

The terrorists moved frequently through the buildings to confuse their pursuers and create the impression of greater numbers.

As the fighting went on, new fires broke out at both hotels in the evening, sending plumes of smoke into the sky. "Every time the terrorists were in a corner and under stress . . . they set fire to the curtains," said J.K. Dutt, director general of the NSG.

By Friday morning, the NSG began to achieve real progress. Later that morning, the NSG cleared the annex section of the Taj, freeing hostages there. It also succeeded in storming The Oberoi, killing one gunman in a corridor and another in a bedroom.

At the Taj and the besieged Chabad House, the fighting continued. Two militants holed up inside the Jewish center had blown off the doors of the elevator on every floor and used the shaft to hide whenever NSG commandos fired back.

It appears they executed their hostages one by one as the commandos closed in. As darkness fell, NSG commandos blasted a wall with explosives and finally penetrated the building. They killed the gunmen.

At the Taj, the battle raged into Friday night, with one gunmen opening fire from a window on hundreds of journalists gathered on the plaza outside. None was hit.

By Saturday morning, the commandos had taken over most of the building. They set a fire to smoke out three terrorists cornered in a restaurant up a spiral staircase from the lobby. Two of the gunmen were shot dead. The third was hit with bullets as he tumbled backward out of a window and onto the plaza outside.

"After that," said Dutt, the NSG chief, "there was no more shooting."

Copyright 2008 Sentinel Communications Co.