The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Mumbai

by Cathy Scott-Clark

  Shortly before midnight, +91 9910 719 424 came on again. The ATS team worked their way up from the Regent hotel on Colaba Causeway, heading along Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg, while the Crime Branch team began at the President, on Cuffe Parade, heading for Hotel Supreme. The signal was intermittent. Left on to Wodehouse Road, the patrols motored towards Hotel Bluebird and the Celeste, where they lost it. Bharti’s men went back over the ground, and into the hotels, demanding guest registers, interrogating the duty managers, sizing up waiters and cross-examining doormen, inhaling the broad strokes of guests’ lives: lists of visitors from Pakistan, Central Asia, Bangladesh, the Gulf States.

  A few minutes later, Bharti drove north by the petrol pump, swerving around the besieged Chabad House Jewish centre, and then left around the crescent to Hotel Antique. +91 9910 719 424 was active again. The ATS deputy was up at the Shabnam hotel, off Strand Road, two blocks further north. It would make sense for the gunmen’s control room to be here, at the heart of the unfolding attacks. Into the lobbies the police teams went once more, quizzing the desk clerks. But the signal fizzled and Bharti parked up.

  When the phone came online a third time, the direction finders pointed Bharti towards the New Martin and Fariyas hotels and then on to the smarter Ascot. Finally a message went out to all cars: ‘Locked on.’ They had it. The number had been captured by three masts and isolated to one grid in Colaba, close to the Taj and the state police headquarters. But they were still a long way from finding their prey. The grid covered a thousand-metres-square area of densely packed apartments and forty hotels, which translated into many hundreds of rooms. They were within reach of the caller, but it would take all night to find him unless they had more clues to work with. As well as physically searching for the phone, the ATS needed to tap the line, in the hope that overheard conversations would guide them in.

  Five miles north in Nagpada, an industrial quarter of South Mumbai, inside a Colonial-era villa set back from the highway in a garden of date palms, the ATS technical team were waiting, surrounded by a tangle of USB cables. Their boss, the ATS chief, Hemant Karkare, had called them in earlier, asking them to eavesdrop on +91 9910 719 424, using an Indian-designed interception package, the Shogi GSM monitoring system, which enabled them to divert the calls through a police landline, so they could record and analyse them from their desks.

  But there was a problem. The phone company, Bharti Airtel, required written authorization from the ATS chief and the state. The last time anyone had seen Karkare had been on TV half an hour ago, when cameras had filmed him donning his bulletproof vest and helmet, preparing to enter Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. The state official authorized to sign was trapped inside the Taj. The ATS technical team had to be patient.

  11.50 p.m. – Rang Bhavan Lane

  Joint Commissioner (ATS) Hemant Karkare, with his aquiline nose and Kipling moustache, had by now moved on from CST on foot, leaving his driver behind at the station. Hearing that the two gunmen who had mown down dozens of commuters had run towards Mumbai’s Cama Hospital, where 370 patients were sitting ducks, he had chased after them alone, reaching Rang Bhavan Lane, a small cut-through that backed on to the hospital. Karkare’s radio suggested that the gunmen had killed three residents here already, and had scaled a wall to get inside the hospital, where they had shot dead two staff.

  Getting his breath back, Karkare called for backup. Control diverted Ashok Kamte, the Additional Commissioner East. Cool under fire, Kamte, a marksman and weapons expert, had been on his way to assist Patil in the Taj. Control fished around again and came up with the strongman Inspector Vijay Salaskar, a senior figure in Rakesh Maria’s Crime Branch. Salaskar was a granite cop who had joined the force in 1983. He was loved or loathed, depending which side of the nakabandi you were sitting on. He had claimed more than sixty-five criminal scalps, many of them in opaque circumstances, taking down his first gangster in his first year as a cop. At the start of this year, he had been named in a judicial inquiry probing the shooting of a seventeen-year-old Muslim boy, who police alleged was a felon, although the teenager’s criminal record could not be found.

  As the policemen gathered at the Cama Hospital’s back gate, a bloodied constable emerged from the building. ‘Terrorists are on the sixth-floor terrace,’ he stammered, explaining that his boss had led six officers up there, two of whom were now dead, while the officer remained trapped inside, badly injured. The police had to get the front covered to stop the gunmen escaping, while Karkare and co. staked out the rear gate. The ATS chief called the Control Room. Even though radio traffic indicated that there were sixty State Reserve Police Force officers in the area, as well as a Quick Response Team and an Assault Squad, no one was dispatched. Exasperated, he gave up waiting. They had to tackle the front gate themselves. Karkare, Kamte and Inspector Salaskar, together with three constables, jumped into a police jeep heading down Rang Bhavan Lane, even as the gunmen slipped out of the front of the hospital, shooting dead a passing police inspector who challenged them, before circling around to the back of the hospital.

  Inspector Salaskar was at the wheel, with Kamte beside him, while Karkare sat in the middle row. In the back were a police driver and three constables, including Salaskar’s deputy, Arun Jadhav, a plain-clothed Crime Branch officer. Eleven floors up, residents began calling the Control Room’s 100 number to warn that the gunmen and the police jeep were on a collision course.

  In the chaos, no one in Control forwarded the messages to Karkare, whose vehicle drove, unsighted, onwards. As it swung round a left-hand dogleg, the crack-shot Kamte glimpsed men with arms and poured fire into the shrubbery. Constable Jadhav saw ‘a lamboo [tall guy] and a butka [short guy]’ step out with assault rifles, calmly blasting the jeep, in controlled bursts, as if this were a training exercise, the vehicle rocking and screeching as rounds punched through the door panels.

  One constable, injured but still breathing, toppled on top of Jadhav, who, hit in the right elbow and left shoulder, dropped his carbine. A second constable, hit in the chest and neck, slumped over both of them. The firing stopped and Jadhav, who was pinned down and haemorrhaging blood, strained to listen. His boss, the invincible Salaskar, was rasping like a punctured tyre. Kamte and Karkare were grimly silent. Have we lost them all?, the constable asked himself, horrified, his eyes filling.

  A police vehicle with its lights flashing zoomed up the lane. ‘Thanks to the Gods,’ Jadhav told himself. But it sped on, although it radioed through what the driver saw: a police jeep shot up and ‘three people lying in the lane’. Jadhav heard it on the car radio. Is something more important than officers down?, Jadhav asked himself. Witnesses called 100 to say the gunmen were walking on, towards the Special Branch office, firing at Kamte’s parked car and driver, before returning to inspect the police jeep they had ambushed. But no one was sent to investigate.

  Inside the jeep, Constable Jadhav, still conscious, heard the doors being opened and the sound of bodies being hauled out. The suspension rocked. Would they also pull out the dead and dying constables on the back seat, discovering him alive at the bottom of the pile? Instead, one gunman climbed into the vehicle, and revved the engine, while the other gunman got into the front passenger seat. The passenger referred to the driver as Brother Ismail and the driver called the passenger Brother Ajmal. Jadhav saw that the passenger ‘was tiny, about five feet three’, with the build of a camel jockey and fair complexion. It was Ajmal Kasab, the boy from Faridkot.

  Ismail put his foot down, and the vehicle slewed this way and that. Jadhav clung on to his colleagues’ uniforms, trying to keep the bodies covering him, as the injured man groaned. Suddenly one of their phones rang and Ajmal put his AK-47 over the back of his seat, and, without looking, shot off a burst of fire. Jadhav felt the rounds punch into his colleagues, and the injured men fell silent. Now there was just Jadhav left.

  Turning right, the jeep shot out of Rang Bhavan Lane towards Metro Junction. Glimpsing police, Ismail swung the vehicle around, drivi
ng towards CST, and into the evacuation of the station’s wounded. Ismail threw another U-turn, the jeep heading back up towards Metro Junction, where he peppered the crowd of reporters and police with rounds. Jadhav, weakened by blood loss, prayed that he would not be hit in the crossfire.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Ismail shouted across to his partner, needing directions. Ajmal admitted he had left his bag with its maps inside the hospital. Ismail thumped the wheel and Constable Jadhav felt a swerve, as the vehicle headed south. ‘One tyre down,’ he said to himself, trying to stay conscious and hold in the pain. Somewhere near the Mantralaya government complex, the noise of grinding told him that they were riding on a rim. Finally, the jeep slewed into a concrete road divider in front of the State Bank of Mysore. Ismail and Ajmal flagged down a passing Škoda, pulled out the driver and two passengers, and took off.

  Jadhav was alone. He clambered out from beneath the pile of bodies and grabbed a radio: ‘Two terrorists have [hijacked] a police Qualis car from the Rang Bhavan Lane.’ He bipped the radio again. ‘PI Salaskar, ATS Sir and South [sic] Region Sir have been fired at.’ The three men were still lying in Rang Bhavan Lane even though Kamte’s driver, who had been shot at after his boss was ambushed, called for help three times, his last communication at 00.37.

  But, by then, all eyes were drawn back to the Taj, where a juddering, growling explosion ripped through the hotel’s Palace wing, rattling the windows, wobbling walls, blasting out doors and dumping clouds of broken glass and plaster on everyone inside.

  Karambir Kang was outside the hotel in his shirtsleeves, helping to remove dead and injured guests on luggage trollies, when he felt the baritone blast pass through his body. His eyes shot up to the sixth floor and even before the shockwave had subsided, his phone began ringing, panicked staff calling from all over the hotel. ‘There is a wall of fire all the way from the stairwell to the roof,’ shouted the hotel’s PR director, who was trapped inside the Sea Lounge with a small party of VIP guests. ‘What should we do? Run for it or barricade?’ ‘Barricade,’ Karambir shouted, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

  Puneet Vatsayan, an old school friend, called from France: ‘Is everything all right?’ The stoic Karambir, gently eased Puneet off the line, before Partha Chatterjee, a senior Tata executive who had been his boss and travelling companion, flying with him all over the subcontinent, called too. ‘Please forget everything. Just pray for my family,’ the General Manager insisted. He sensed Neeti and the boys were running out of time.

  When Patil called down a little while later, asking Karambir to come up, he declined. The DCP was infuriated as he did not know the police outside were advising the hotel manager that it was too dangerous to go in. Karambir was also over-burdened by a sense of duty. All he could think about was how to round up staff and be the visible, useful figurehead of a crippled hotel. Daring rescue bids would have calmed his fears for his own family, but they could have left the Taj rudderless, risking the lives of hundreds of guests and staff. ‘It’s important for me to be here,’ he said to a colleague.

  Taking another call, he was so distracted that it took him a few words to realize it was Neeti. She tried to sound calm for the sake of the boys, whom she clutched on either side of her. ‘What was that explosion?’ she asked. Smoke was pouring into their apartment and the electricity was shorting. The room’s sprinklers had switched on too, dousing them all. ‘Probably a small bomb has gone off,’ he replied, working hard to hold it together. He recalled what Patil had told them. The gunmen were prowling on the sixth. He warned Neeti not to rush out.

  ‘What should we do?’ Neeti asked sobbing. ‘You will be safest staying there,’ Karambir said gently, suggesting she and Uday should get wet towels to block out the smoke. They should build a barrier across the door and shift to the bathroom, the most secure room in the apartment. And then? The security forces would catch the gunmen soon enough, he assured her. But he no longer believed it.

  Thursday, 27 November 2008, 12.40 a.m. – Marine Drive

  The normal soundtrack to the city was the growling congestion that turned a thirteen-mile dash from Apollo Bunder to Andheri (and the airport) into a sclerotic, two-hour crawl. However, on this cool, dry, post-monsoon evening, the police and army had locked down all the main thoroughfares, resulting in the kind of profound silence that had not been heard for half a century.

  Behind the Taj, in Back Bay, a lone silver Škoda sped up a des-erted Marine Drive in the halogen glow, passing the Trident–Oberoi, also under siege, and following the Queen’s Necklace, the board-walk of lights, north. ‘Škoda car, Škoda car MH- 02 JP1276, silver colour, hijacked by terrorists,’ an officer radioed, the alert reaching a roadblock opposite the Ideal Café, in Chowpatty, the last major junction before the road wound up into Malabar Hill. Police cocked their weapons as the car appeared, juddering to a halt in front of them. A sub- inspector stepped forward, facing the dazzling headlights, blowing his whistle. The driver turned on his wipers, spraying the windscreen to obscure the view.

  ‘Switch off the lights, raise your hands and step out.’ The car engine revved and the car lurched towards him. At the last minute it swung round, getting stuck on a road divider. Two officers ran to Ajmal’s side, while someone shot out the rear window. Ismail told Ajmal to raise his hands and then pulled out a pistol and fired at the advancing police. They returned fire and, to Ajmal’s horror, Ismail slumped, shot in the neck.

  Ajmal cautiously opened his door. He appeared to stumble before hauling out an assault rifle from between his legs. A policeman grabbed the barrel, pulling and tugging. Ajmal got his finger to the trigger and let off a long burst into the officer’s stomach. The policeman lurched back but held on, even as he was dying, the skin of his hands fused to the burning AK.

  A mob of khaki uniforms turned on blood-spattered Ajmal, kicking, stripping, slapping and beating him, bystanders joining in, too, until someone cried out: ‘Stop, stop, we need him alive.’ He was pushed into an ambulance, lying on the metal floor, his hands tied together with a handkerchief, Ismail’s corpse jiggling beside him. Ajmal’s brand-new tennis shoes were left behind in the road.

  Calls about the shooting of three legendary police officers in Rang Bhavan Lane were piling up, but the only person to reach the scene was Karkare’s wireless operator, who radioed in the catastrophe at 00.47: ‘Karkare Sir, East Region Sir [Kamte] and PI Salaskar Sir are injured. We are taking them to the hospital.’

  In the Control Room, the tragedy was instantly displaced by other news. Two gunmen had been shot in Chowpatty. ‘Where are the bodies?’ Maria demanded, calling Chowpatty’s Assistant Commissioner. ‘One is killed, but one is alive,’ the officer revealed. Maria was stunned. This was a huge result. Was the tide turning? He called for his staff car, readying to interrogate the prisoner. But before he got out of the door, Commissioner Gafoor rang, telling him to stay put. This was Chowpatty’s jurisdiction and its Additional Commissioner would be in charge. Maria was incandescent. The city was burning, and the Taj besieged. The force needed a scalpel to fillet information from the captured gunmen. The Additional Commissioner, who had inched his way up over twenty-five years, was, with all respect, more slow moving. But Gafoor, who was under intense pressure, was insistent and unyielding. This was Chowpatty’s show.

  Maria bit his lip and quietly dispatched a trusted Crime Branch inspector to shadow the Additional Commissioner and make sure he did not screw it up. There were five questions he needed answering at this critical juncture: how many terrorists were there, who sent them, how had they entered the city, what was their aim and where was the location of their control? ‘Open the prisoner’s mouth and check for cyanide,’ he shouted after his man.

  At 00.56, Gafoor came back on the line. Where were Kamte and Karkare? Maria choked. ‘. . . Sir, Ashok [Kamte] is near the SB office, sir. He is covering the SB office, sir.’ But Kamte was not there. He had been down the road, in Rang Bhavan Lane, the victim of a deadly shooting, an incident that had b
een called in by many eyewitnesses and police patrols from shortly after midnight.

  What about the ATS chief, Hemant Karkare? ‘Sir . . . Sir, he . . . he . . . he . . . Hemant was . . . sir, at the CST railway station. I will find out the location and tell him to get in touch with you right away, sir.’ The Control Room log showed that the ATS chief had called in his decision to leave CST for Cama Hospital at 23.24, more than an hour and a half earlier.

  The Commissioner pressed on, unsure of what he was being told: ‘I only want to know whether Mr Karkare and Kamte are injured or are they safe?’ Maria, normally unflappable, replied: ‘Sir, trying to do that, sir. Sir, as for the report . . . that there was firing on East Region [Kamte] vehicle, nobody is injured. As soon as I get through I will get back to you.’ There was no mention of the bullet-riddled Qualis in which all three officers had been gunned down. ‘You will send a party . . . ?’ the Commissioner asked. ‘Already done, sir . . . Already done, sir. Additional CP Crime and there are three units of Crime Branch on the job, sir,’ Maria said, signing off.

  Nine minutes earlier, Karkare’s radio operator had called Control to confirm that the fallen officers were in transit to GT Hospital, where all of them were declared dead.

  1 a.m. – Nair Hospital

  Sandwiched between Mumbai Central railway station and the city’s Mahalaxmi racetrack (named after the goddess of luck and prosperity), Nair Hospital lay four miles north of the Taj. Chowpatty’s Additional Commissioner Tanaji Ghadge was already waiting, chewing a wodge of paan, a police belt cinching his overfed belly, when Ajmal Kasab was stretchered in.

  In a private room of the casualty ward, Ajmal was stripped, cleaned up and placed on a metal bed on top of a green plastic sheet, his torso left bare, a rough wool blanket thrown over his belly. He lay connected to a drip, his right arm and left hand bandaged, both hands blackened with gunpowder.