MUMBAI: At least 80 people, including Anti-Terror Squad chief Hemant Karkare, were killed and, according to an Indian newspaper, 900 wounded in a series of shootings around India’s financial capital Mumbai last night, with two five-star hotels among the targets in what police called a terror attack.
Maharashtra state police chief A.N. Roy said attackers had fired automatic weapons indiscriminately and used grenades.
“These are terrorist strikes in at least seven places,” he told the NDTV news channel. “Unknown terrorists have gone with automatic weapons and opened fire indiscriminately. At a few places they even used grenades.”
Police said targets included the luxury Taj and Oberoi hotels, with television stations showing the lobbies of both hotels on fire and people being evacuated from the Oberoi with their hands on their heads.
“The lobby of the Taj hotel is on fire,” a police spokesman said at the time of going to press. “We are trying to find out how many people are inside the hotel.”
Some of the injured were evacuated from the Taj on the hotel’s golden luggage carts, while waiters in black and white formal wear and chefs were seen leaving the Oberoi.
Television stations also reported shooting outside the Cafe Leopold, a popular restaurant for tourists in the city, and at hospitals and railway stations.
One eyewitness heard two explosions and then short bursts of automatic gunfire in the same street as the restaurant. The wreckage of a red scooter, the remains of shop awnings and broken glass were strewn across the street.
Armed police, rifles cocked at the hip, set up barricades around the explosion site, and local people were seen yelling at each other, angry that another terror attack had hit the city.
Vehicles and street vendors’ barrows were used to keep locals away, and speeding military four-wheel drives with horns blaring arrived at the bomb site.
There were other attacks elsewhere.
“They entered the passenger hub of a station and started firing,” A.K. Sharma, a Mumbai railway police commissioner, told local television.
Sameeran Chakraborty, a Mumbai resident, told the NDTV news channel he heard a blast inside a car near the city airport.
“It was a big noise and one car was involved, definitely not more than that.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condemned the attacks and said the Maharashtra government would get all the assistance required. The BBC said that British member of the European Parliament, Sajjad Karim, was at the Taj at the time and saw a gunman open fire in the lobby. “All I saw was one man on foot carrying a machine gun-type of weapon — which I then saw him firing from and I saw people hitting the floor, people right next to me,” he was quoted as saying.
One British guest told local Indian television that he had been among a dozen people herded together by two heavily armed men and taken up to the hotel’s upper floors.
“They were very young, like boys really, wearing jeans and T-shirts,” the guest said.
“They said they wanted anyone with British and American passports and then they took us up the stairs. I think they wanted to take us to the roof,” he said, adding that he and another hostage had managed to escape when they reached the 18th floor.
India has suffered a wave of bomb attacks in recent years. Most have been blamed on Muslims, although police have also arrested many Hindu extremists, including a serving colonel, for their involvement in some of the terror attacks.
