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Dishevelled and shaken, a bomb disposal expert with Mumbai's anti-terrorism squad sat 100 metres from the historic Taj Mahal hotel last night waiting with visible dread for the next summons: another trip into the heart of the gun-and-grenade battle entering its third day in the heart of India's leading city.

“It's mind-boggling in there. The architecture makes it like a puzzle, and there are mirrors everywhere, so that as soon as you step into a hallway, anyone who is hiding around a corner can see you,” he said, describing the winding halls and many nooks of the 105-year-old heritage building as a sort of lethal carnival fun house.

Under the cover of police snipers, he had made repeated trips into the hotel to defuse what he described as a web of booby traps laid by a handful of militants who seized the hotel on Wednesday night. He declined to give his name because he is not authorized to speak publicly about his work.

The hotel floors are strewn with glass and charred furniture, he said, while a heavy chemical smell stings his eyes as soon as he enters. The hallways are littered with the bodies of dead guests and staff members. “I am now mentally disturbed, because I have seen so many corpses,” he said.

The small band of attackers has turned the whole hotel into a weapon.

“You can barely step, because you don't know where they've planted what.”

The scenes he described, in one of the few accounts to emerge from inside the siege since most of the hotel guests and employees were rescued on the first day, served to answer one key question: Why did a battle with just a few attackers go on this long?

But it also raised another: How is it that a half-dozen young men, at most, who went in with only a gun and a backpack each, could withstand a days-long assault by the full might of the Indian security forces?

This is what Indians want to know today: Who are these people? And how did they pull this off?

The answer seems to be that the assault was expertly planned and a weapons cache was smuggled in well beforehand.

The battle at the Taj emerged as the locus of the Mumbai attacks Friday afternoon, after the last of the hostages were rescued from the towers of the Oberoi Hotel; a few hours later, commandos who had slid down ropes from helicopters that morning finally took control of a besieged Orthodox Jewish centre nearby.

Three days of attacks ended Saturday after Indian commandos completed operations to dislodge Islamist militants at the Taj, officials said.

“Taj is under our control,” Mumbai police chief Hasan Gafoor told Reuters, shortly after the building was raked by heavy gunfire and flames leaped out.

At least three militants and one trooper were killed, the country's commando chief Jyoti Krishna Dutt told a news conference. There was no word on the fate of hostages or any remaining guests who might have been trapped.

As more bodies were discovered at both sites, and some evacuated from the Taj, the death toll climbed to more than 150, including two Canadians, while at least 370 people have been injured.

Earlier, the ocean-front plaza rang with the sharp crash of grenades – a booming sound coming from those used by the Indian forces, a duller thud from the Chinese-made grenades apparently used by the attackers – as they fought room by room.

The grenade blasts were often followed by a crackle of gunfire; each percussion sent a huge flock of pigeons careening into the air, to wheel out over the sea and then settle warily again on the dome and turrets of the Taj.

It was possible to track the fighting through the hotel by the bursts of vivid orange flame that erupted in the rooms, leaving blackened curtains to flutter limply in shattered windows.

From the early morning, the Indian police insisted every few hours that the Taj was now “cleansed” or “neutralized.” Then the grenade explosions would sound again. The police said no more than one or two, at most four, terrorists were still fighting the teams of commandos, but the battle went on all Friday, with periodic lulls of about half an hour, and into Saturday morning.

The Indian police say the operation began at sea. As Pakistani Islamists are increasingly suspected by the Indian government to be responsible, the police are pushing the theory that the attackers sailed from Karachi to near Mumbai, moved from a larger ship to a hijacked or prearranged fishing trawler, motored into Mumbai harbour and transferred again into small dinghies. Shortly before 10 p.m. on Wednesday, they landed at the Gate of India, a huge stone plinth that commemorates the arrival in what was then Bombay by King George V and Queen Mary in 1911.

Then, police say, the attackers split.

Some went into town. Some headed for the Oberoi. And a group of what by most accounts was no more than four young men, described by witnesses as fit, clean-shaven and in their 20s, ran the 100 metres to the Taj, carrying AK-47s and satchels.

While different branches of police and government have provided conflicting information, and rescued hostages and guests who escaped tell stories that often contradict each other, it is possible to conclude that the attackers knew the hotel well and had laid careful plans for their assault. One small group seems to have run in a side door normally kept closed, but which was open that night for a special corporate function. Another hopped a fence at the back of the hotel, bypassing the guards and metal detectors at the doors.

Both groups began to shoot randomly, moving toward the grand central foyer of the hotel beneath the dome, where they met up wordlessly, turned, and ran up the grand central staircase, and then burst into the residence of the general manager, where they executed his wife and two young children before moving on to the executive offices. Ratan Tata, who runs the Tata Group that owns the hotel, told reporters here that staff who saw the shooters could tell they were intimately acquainted with both the layout and the operations of the hotel.

At about this point, hotel security and local police began to engage the gunmen, and the shooting soon evolved into a room-by-room battle.

There have been repeated reports, which police now deny, that the attackers took hostages as human shields, as well as widespread speculation that they must have had ammunition already hidden in the hotel, to allow them to continue to fight this hard and this long.

The Indian intelligence service said Friday that it had arrested at least one man affiliated with the attacks who checked into the Oberoi hotel several days ago and had somehow brought past luggage screening a large cache of explosives and bullets and stored them in his room.

The protracted battle left citizens in Mumbai muttering about their police force. “We people here, we don't know anything about war, but how is it possible that it can take the army this long to fight just a small group? How can so many police and soldiers be there and they have not finished this thing?” asked Deepa Pareek, a 26-year-old lawyer who stood with friends a few blocks from the Taj Friday.

Indeed, the police outside the hotel often had a Keystone Cops sort of air, milling around in the plaza below, before suddenly diving for cover when shots burst out.

But Uday Bhaskar, a former director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, called the criticism unfair.

“The Indian security forces did screw up in terms of allowing it to happen – there was a massive intelligence failure,” he said. “But as far as the operation is concerned in a tactical sense – this is the first experience of urban terrorism of this scale. … Given the scale of the entire terrorist resistance and the way in which they have taken hostages – as a security analyst, I would say this has been done well.”

Avinesh Kadam, a paramedic with the Mumbai Fire Department who went into the hotel Thursday to bring out bodies and was on standby there last night, said the police commandos inside had been there since shortly after the siege began, subsisting on the water and glucose biscuits they brought with them. They were crawling through the hallways, checking each room – sometimes finding guests who refused either to believe they were police, or to come out, he said.

The bomb expert entering his third day on the job would take no credit for his role in the fight. “The ones who have been in there for the last three days – they are the heroes.”

With a report from Anuj Chopra in Mumbai, special to The Globe and Mail, and Reuters