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.
