Mumbai Terrorist Siege Over, India Says

Arko Datta/Reuters
Flames and smoke poured from the Taj hotel in Mumbai, India, on Saturday. More Photos >
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By SOMINI SENGUPTA and KEITH BRADSHER

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/world/asia/30mumbai.html?ref=world

A Day of Reckoning as India Toll Tops 170
Arko Datta/Reuters

By SOMINI SENGUPTA and KEITH BRADSHER
Published: November 29, 2008
MUMBAI, India — Death hung over Mumbai on Saturday.


Back Story With Keith BradsherBodies were extracted from the ruins of the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel in the hours after the standoff with militants there ended on Saturday in a gunfight and fire. At the main city hospital morgue, relatives came, clutching one another in grief, to identify their dead. By midafternoon, the morgue was running out of body bags, and by evening the death toll had risen to at least 172. Funerals, among them ceremonies for two policemen and a lawyer, went on throughout the day.


As the reckoning began after the three-day siege here, troubling questions arose about the apparent failure of the Indian authorities to anticipate the attack or respond to it more swiftly.

And tensions were high, as well, between India and Pakistan, where officials insisted that their government had nothing to do with assisting the attackers and promised that they would act swiftly if any connection was found within their country.

Perhaps the most troubling question to emerge Saturday for the Indian authorities was how, if official estimates are accurate, just 10 gunmen could have caused so much carnage and repelled Indian police officers, paramilitary forces and soldiers for more than three days in three different buildings.

As the investigation continued, it was unclear whether the attackers had collaborators already in the city, or whether others in their group had escaped. All told, the gunmen struck 10 sites in bustling south Mumbai.

Amid the cleanup effort in this stricken city, the brutality of the gunmen became plain to see, as accounts from investigators and survivors portrayed a wide trail of destruction and indiscriminate killing wherever the terrorists went.

At a gas station near the Taj hotel, attackers opened fire on two waiting cars on Wednesday, critically injuring two occupants. When a married couple in their 70s went to their third-floor window to see what was happening, the terrorists blazed away with assault rifles, killing both and leaving shards of glass that still hung in the window on Saturday.

Down the road, when the gunmen seized Nariman House, the headquarters here of a Jewish religious organization, neighbors mistook the initial shots on Wednesday night for firecrackers to celebrate India’s cricket victory over England.

But when drunken revelers in a nearby alley began throwing bottles and stones, two attackers stepped onto a balcony of Nariman House and opened fire on passers-by, killing a 22-year-old call center worker who was the sole support of his widowed mother; five others were injured. A teenage boy who stepped out onto his balcony and came within firing range was swiftly shot and killed, a witness said.

“We still don’t know why they did this,” said Rony Dass, a cable television installer who lives across the street from the gas station. He lost a lifelong friend, a tailor who was locking up his store for the night on Wednesday, only to be killed by a gunman.

At the Oberoi hotel, the second luxury hotel to be assaulted, the gunmen called guests on hotel phones; some of those who picked up were then attacked, their doors smashed open and the guests shot. At the Taj, terrorists broke in room by room and shot occupants at point blank range. Some were shot in the back.

“I think their intention was to kill as many people as possible and do as much physical damage as possible,” said P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, which manages the adjacent Oberoi and Trident Hotels, both of which were attacked.

Evidence unfolded that the gunmen killed their victims early on in the siege and left the bodies, apparently fooling Indian security forces into thinking that they were still holding hostages. At the Sir J.J. Hospital morgue, an official in charge of the post-mortems, not authorized to speak to the press, said that of the 87 bodies he had examined, all but a handful had been killed Wednesday night and early Thursday. By Saturday night, 239 people had been reported injured.

Contrary to earlier reports, it appeared that Westerners were not the gunmen’s main targets: they killed whoever they could. By Saturday evening, 18 of the dead were confirmed as foreigners; an additional 22 foreigners were injured, said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra State, where Mumbai is located.

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The State Department has said at least five Americans died in the attacks. Consular officials from Britain, the Netherlands and Israel went to morgues on Saturday to see if their missing citizens had turned up there.


Back Story With Keith BradsherThere were reports on the first night of the attacks that gunmen had rounded up holders of American and British passports at the Oberoi and herded them upstairs. But Rattan Keswani, the president of Trident Hotels, said he had found no basis for such reports.

“Nothing seems to suggest that,” he said, noting that a range of nationalities was represented among the 22 hotel guests who died, in addition to the 10 staff members, all Indian.

The city’s police chief, Hasan Gafoor, said nine gunmen were killed, the last of whom fell out of the terrace of the Taj hotel on Saturday morning as the siege ended. His body was charred beyond recognition when it was taken to the hospital. A 10th suspected terrorist was arrested; the police say he is a 21-year-old Pakistani, Ajmal Amir Kasab.

A senior Mumbai police inspector, Nagappa R. Mali, said the suspect and one of his collaborators, who was slain by the police, had killed three top police officials, including the head of the antiterrorist squad, Hemant Karkare.

Mr. Karkare was cremated Saturday morning in a crowded and emotional farewell.

The bodies of four other suspected terrorists were at the morgue at the Sir J.J. Hospital in Mumbai. Officials there put their ages between 20 and 25. All four were men.

Around dawn on Saturday, gunfire began to rattle inside the Taj Mahal hotel, one of about a dozen sites that the militants attacked beginning Wednesday night. They never issued any manifestoes or made any demands, and it seemed clear from their stubborn resistance at the Taj that they intended to fight to the last.

It was not long before flames were roaring through a ground-floor ballroom and the first floor of the Taj, a majestic 105-year-old hotel in the heart of southern Mumbai.

But by midmorning, after commandos had finished working their way through the 565-room hotel, the head of the elite National Security Guards, J. K. Dutt, said the siege at the Taj was over. Three terrorists, he said, had been killed inside.

By afternoon, busloads of elite commandos, fresh from the siege of the hotel, sat outside the nearby Gateway of India and shook hands with elated spectators.

“There were so many people and we wanted to avoid any civilian casualties,” one of the commandos told a private television station, CNN-IBN. He said they were firing from various parts of the hotel. By the end of the siege, he said, the gunmen had holed up in one room and barricaded the door with explosives.

The siege may have been over, but new tensions within the region were on the rise, particularly after India’s foreign minister on Friday blamed “elements” within Pakistan for the attack.

In an attempt to defuse the situation on Saturday, the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, told an Indian television channel in a live telephone interview that he supported a thorough investigation “no matter where it may lead.”

“My heard bleeds for India,” Mr. Zardari said. “As president of Pakistan, if any evidence points to anyone in my country,” Pakistan will take action, he said.

Mr. Zardari said he did not rule out the possibility of the top official of the Pakistani intelligence agency working with Indian officials on the case. But it was too early in the investigation for the top official to meet with his Indian counterpart to share information, Mr. Zardari said.

Soon after Mr. Zardari’s interview on Indian television, the Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, said the Pakistani government was not involved in the attack.

“Our hands are clean,” Mr. Qureshi told a news conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, after a lengthy cabinet meeting called to discuss the rising tensions between the two rival countries. “We have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Mr. Qureshi also stressed that the Indian government had not blamed the Pakistani government for the attacks.

“They are suspecting, perhaps suspecting, groups or organizations that could have a presence here,” he said. “We have said if they have evidence they should share it with us.”