BEHIND THE HEADLINES
‘Backpackers with assault rifles’ tote terror to Mumbai
The death squads worked in pairs, wreaking carnage across Mumbai, India, over three days. Based on accounts of eyewitnesses, a re-creation of the opening moments of terror.
MUMBAI, India — 9:21 p. m. Wednesday, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus — Two young men walk casually through Mumbai’s main railway station, a Victorian hulk bustling with late commuters heading home, scurrying past small food stands and juice bars and vendors selling newspapers.
They enter near the taxi stand, where long lines of battered black and yellow cabs wait for fares. One wears khaki cargo pants and a blue T-shirt. A pair of small knapsacks are slung over a shoulder. He looks like a college kid.
Across the street, Sebastian D’Souza, photo editor of the Mumbai Mirror, hears the gunfire from his office at the tabloid newspaper.
He follows the sound through the sprawling station, slipping unseen through parked trains. When he first catches sight of the young men, he doesn’t realize they are the gunmen. They look so innocent. Then he sees them shooting.
He describes them as “backpackers with assault rifles.”
“They were firing from their hips. Very professional. Very cool,” D’Souza said. For more than 45 minutes he follows as they move from platform to platform shooting and throwing grenades. Often, D’Souza isn’t even 30 feet away. The few police at the station are dead, in hiding or had long fled.
About 9:30 p. m., Nariman House, Mumbai headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement — A gunshot startles the family of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and others in the recently renovated Jewish center on a back road off a main street in Mumbai’s Colaba neighborhood.
The pale yellow building, with its synagogue, kosher dining room and friendly rabbi, was a magnet for Israeli backpackers looking for a place to celebrate holidays while on vacation and an important religious center for Mumbai’s small Jewish community.
Someone must be lighting firecrackers, thought Sandra Samuel, a maid at the center.
Then a gunman came up the stairs. She and another employee duck into a room and hide in terror as explosions and gunshots rattle the building through the night.
“They destroyed everything, the lift, the dining room, everything,” she said later.
About 9:30 p.m., Leopold Cafe and Bar — The place known as Leo’s is one of the city’s famous tourist restaurants, crammed with glass-topped tables, old travel posters and lounging backpackers drinking cheap beer.
About 100 people are inside when two gunmen appear. One lobs a grenade, and both open fire.
“It was total chaos. . . . People didn’t know what was going on. Some hit the floor, some ran out of the side entrance or tried to find a place to hide,” said Farzad Jehani, who owns the restaurant with his brother.
The assault lasts, perhaps, two minutes. When it’s over, at least four foreigners and three Indians are dead, though the brothers aren’t sure because patrons rush the casualties to hospitals in cars and taxis.
By then the gunmen have left, jogging through the streets and apparently moving on to one of India’s most famous hotels just a few blocks away.
“They weren’t aiming at anyone in particular. It was like they wanted to empty their magazines and do as much damage here as possible before heading to the Taj,” Jehani said.
About 9:45 p.m., Taj Mahal Hotel — No one believes it’s gunfire. Not at the Taj. Built more than a century ago by one of India’s most powerful business families, the Taj Mahal is the crossroads of the city’s elite. It has been the scene of countless society weddings, business meetings and expensive dates. It is an icon of Mumbai.
But two men are spraying gunfire across the ornate lobby, with its gray marble floor and Persian carpets the size of small swimming pools.
Dalbir Bains, who runs a high-end lingerie shop, is sitting down to a steak dinner by the pool with friends. They joke about hearing gunfire. Quickly, though, screams fill the hotel and her laughs turn to terror. She runs upstairs and huddles under a table in a restaurant with about 50 others, desperately trying to be quiet.
About 10 p.m., Oberoi Hotel — Joseph Joy Pulithara, a waiter, is working in the Chinese restaurant of this modern luxurious monolith when the gunfire starts, sending diners and staff scrambling. Pulithara is shot in the leg. A woman nearby him is shot in the head.
The gunmen run into another restaurant and fire unrelenting bursts at the diners and waiters, says Andreina Varagona, an American meditation teacher shot in the arm and leg. At least a dozen people fall to the floor dead, including one of Varagona’s friends.
“There were bodies everywhere,” Varagona said. “I felt like I was in a movie.”
The attackers herd dozens of survivors into a stairwell. One demands to see their IDs, saying he was looking for Americans and Britons. Then he forces them upstairs, says Alex Chamberlain, a British guest.
Staff in one restaurant spirit at least 60 diners into a kitchen and then hustle them to another room where they are served refreshments and then escorted outside, according to P.R.S. Oberoi, the hotel’s chairman.
Other guests barricade themselves in their rooms.
The gunmen began taking hostages.
Thursday morning, Oberoi Hotel — A banner hanging from a window carries a simple but wrenching plea: “Save Us.”
