The Siege Read online

  Nine stainless steel trays lay before him. The brothers who had fought inside the Taj were the hardest to look at. Ali’s and Shoaib’s faces had been crushed into hideous grins. Umer, the diminutive Taj leader, was burnt beyond recognition, and all that was left of Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ was a mangled clump of burnt body parts and singed red material.

  Ajmal turned furiously to his police guard, his world imploding: ‘Take me away.’ He was driven back to his solitary cell, where his interrogator was waiting for him. ‘So, Ajmal,’ he said, smiling. ‘Did you see the glow on their faces and smell the fragrance of roses rising from their bodies?’

  Bitterly, Ajmal wept.

  Illustrations

  1. The Taj hotel, Mumbai, overlooking the central dome and the Arabian Sea.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  2. The Taj from poolside.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  3. Jamsetji Tata (third from right), who built the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, with his family.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  4. Indian princes forming a guard of honour to welcome the new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, on his arrival at the Gateway of India, 1931. Photograph taken from the Taj.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  5. Original architectural plan for the central dome of the Taj.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  6. Faustine Martis (left) in his early days working as a Taj waiter.

  Florence Martis

  7. Portrait of the Taj chefs that hangs on the wall in the kitchens, with Nitin Minocha (far left) and Hemant Oberoi, holding a tomato (centre).

  Ian Pereira

  8. Kaizad Kamdin, one of the chefs who died during the aborted evacuation of Chambers, in the Taj kitchens.

  Kamdin family

  9. The Chambers Club, where many were trapped.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  10. The Crystal Room, where Amit and Varsha Thadani were due to hold their wedding reception.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  11. Amit and Varsha Thadani on their wedding day, 25 November 2008, the day before the attacks.

  Amit Thadani

  12. Uday and Samar Kang photographed in the Taj Memories Studio just an hour before the hotel came under attack.

  Taj Memories (courtesy Sarosh Engineer and Pearl Dubash)

  13. (Left to right) Florence Martis, Faustine Martis, Precilla Martis and Floyd Martis.

  Florence Martis

  14. (Left to right) Ambreen Khan and Sabina Sehgal Saikia.

  Ambreen Khan

  15. Andreas Liveras in Monaco.

  Remesh Cheruvoth

  16. Kuttalam Rajagopalan Ramamoorthy, who was held as a hostage, with his granddaughter.

  K. R. Ramamoorthy

  17. Remesh Cheruvoth, cruise director for Andreas Liveras, with the super-yacht Alysia in the background.

  Remesh Cheruvoth

  18. An early shot of Daood Saleem Gilani, before he changed his name to David Headley, and his mother, Serrill Headley, taken before they moved to Pakistan.

  Author archive

  19. This photograph of David Headley was his mother’s favourite. She had an enormous print of it laminated and hung it on her wall.

  Author archive

  20. A youthful David Headley.

  Author archive

  21. Faiza Outhala, David Headley’s Moroccan wife.

  Author archive

  22. David Headley entering India for his last surveillance operation in July 2008. This picture was taken by a CCTV camera in the immigration queue at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, Mumbai.

  Mumbai immigration authorities

  23. Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ (front) and Ali caught on CCTV outside the Chambers Club.

  Mumbai Crime Branch

  24. CCTV screen grabs of Shoaib, Abdul Rehman ‘Bada’ and Umer trying to get into Chambers in the early hours of 27 November 2008.

  Mumbai Crime Branch

  25. Ajmal Kasab in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

  Reuters/The Times of India

  26. Mobile phone picture taken inside Chambers, showing Bhisham Mansukhani dressed in black and lying on the floor to the right, and his mother, dressed in a black sari, sitting in a chair behind him.

  Tilu Mangeshikar

  27. Bhisham Mansukhani (right) with Prashant Mangeshikar (left) at 11 p.m. on 26 November 2008, shortly after they had been led by hotel staff from the Crystal Room into Chambers. Prashant was the husband of the Bombay Hospital anaesthetist Dr Tilu, who tended to injured staff in Chambers after the failed evacuation in the early hours of the following morning. He survived the attacks.

  Tilu Mangeshikar

  28. The Taj burning.

  Reuters /Arko Datta

  29. DCP Vishwas Patil was one of only a handful of police officers to enter the Taj on the night of the attacks.

  Vasant Prabhu/Indian Express

  30. Guests escaping out of windows of the Taj.

  AFP/Getty

  31. An NSG commando, known as a Black Cat, entering the Taj.

  Reuters

  32. The Taj’s General Manager, Karambir Kang, reacts while sitting in front of the hotel on 27 November 2008. At least 101 people have been killed in attacks by gunmen in Mumbai, including his wife and two sons.

  Reuters /Arko Datta

  33. Mike Pollack (third left) sheltering from bullets moments after he escapes from the Taj.

  Reuters

  34. Mobile phone picture of Ajmal Kasab being interrogated at the Mumbai Crime Branch, early morning, 27 November 2008.

  Mumbai police

  35. AK-47 magazines and unused bullets recovered from the Taj hotel.

  Mumbai Crime Branch

  36. Hasan Gafoor, Mumbai police commissioner at the time of the attacks, giving a press conference.

  Reuters

  37. The aftermath: looking down from the sixth floor of the Taj.

  Sachin Waze

  38. Battleground: inside the Harbour Bar after the final battle.

  Sachin Waze

  39. Arne Strømme and Line Kristin Woldbeck at Bombay Hospital on 27 November 2008.

  Rovert S. Eik, Scanpix, Norway

  40. Amit Peshave, former senior manager at the Shamiana restaurant.

  Amit Peshave

  41. Will Pike with his girlfriend, Kelly Doyle, in Bombay Hospital shortly after being operated on for the first time.

  42. Advertisement placed by the Tata group when the hotel reopened.

  Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Collection

  43. Memorial for the dead chefs in the Taj.

  Author archive

  44. Mike and Anjali Pollack on the steps of the Taj just after they have been evacuated.

  Mike Pollack

  Afterword

  Terrorism is often described as asymmetrical, and Mumbai provides a chilling illustration of what that means: ten resentful and misguided young men who were able to hold the world’s fourth-largest city to ransom, killing 166 and injuring more than 300 over three nights of horror.

  Images from the ravaged city travelled the world. There were countless tragic stories. At Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where Ajmal Kasab and his accomplice gunned down fifty-eight commuters, wounding another 104, a thirteen-year-old boy was saved from the firing and taken to a hospital where doctors calculated when to tell him that his parents, an uncle and three cousins had perished. Outside Chabad House, Sandra Samuel, a nanny, clutched the two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg as his parents, Rabbi Gavriel and his pregnant wife, Rivka, were murdered, alongside four other hostages. After the bodies of thirty-two staff and guests were recovered from the Trident–Oberoi hotels, a Turkish Muslim couple, Seyfi and Meltem Muezzinoglu, held captive for eight hours, recalled how they burst into mourning after watching the gunmen execute a group of female hostages. ‘We stepped forward, opened our hands and said our prayers out loud,’ Seyfi said. ‘And you know what happened? On
e of the gunmen was staring at us with big eyes. He didn’t believe it and started looking at the floor. He was ashamed. We spoke our prayers in Arabic, and we spoke them loud, hand in hand in front of those bodies.’ There were many more harrowing and life-affirming snapshots from the Leopold Café, from Cama Hospital, the Metro cinema and Rang Bhavan Lane. Also from the city’s port area, where one taxi bomb detonated, and at Vile Parle, where another exploded, all of these acts of inhumanity haunting police chiefs all over the world, who pondered how their forces would have coped.

  They studied Mumbai’s days of reckoning, and picked up on Lashkar’s unnerving innovations. Handlers in Pakistan had guided their gunmen in real time using a cheap Internet telephony network, while disguising their location. Equipped with satellite TV and Google Earth, these invisible controllers had simply sat back in Karachi, zooming in and out of the stricken city with the flick of a mouse or remote control. Everyone in Mumbai who called or texted in an interview with a rolling news channel gave these men insights into the strategy of the Indian security forces, alerting them also to fresh targets. Hours of chilling, eavesdropped telephone conversations revealed the cold calculations of the masterminds who pushed their men into a slaughter, before ensuring that they were consumed by it. These extraordinary tapes also exposed the child-like nature of the gunmen, teetering between mania, self-doubt, sadism and exhaustion.

  All of the above are compelling reasons for us to write about 26/11, as the attacks became known in India, and we began researching The Siege soon after the assaults were over. However, a common reaction among the authorities in Mumbai when we first sought them out was fatigue and suspicion. Rakesh Maria, the city’s most famous cop, who was promoted in 2010 to chief of the Anti-Terrorist Squad, replacing his murdered colleague, Hemant Karkare, insisted that those three days in November 2008 simply represented a failure of imagination on the part of the police and intelligence agencies. ‘Everything’s been said that needs to be,’ Maria initially claimed, after we had waited hours to see him in his first-floor office at the ATS headquarters, in Nagpada.

  But once we had begun trawling through the evidence the opposite seemed true. While the 9/11 commission of inquiry in the United States enlisted a ten-man bi-partisan board of politicians to probe every facet of the attacks, and the 7/7 inquests in London spent six months recording every detail and witness statement, 26/11 received only a cursory grilling from the Pradhan Commission, a two-man panel formed in Mumbai on 30 December 2008 to explore the ‘war-like’ attacks on the city.

  Having been precluded from cross-examining the intelligence services, politicians or the National Security Guard, it produced a sixty-four-page inquiry report, which was widely lambasted for lacking depth. Pradhan exonerated Mumbai’s police force, although it did accuse Police Commissioner Hasan Gafoor of failing to be more visible. Even these weak words were rejected by the state legislature. Gafoor, who responded by blaming other senior officers for the mistakes of 26/11, died of a heart attack in Breach Candy Hospital in 2012, by which time the majority of the Pradhan Commission’s recommendations to better detect future attacks (and thwart them) had still not been implemented.

  The National Security Guard was also wary of speaking out, eventually confirming in writing to us that it did not want to participate in the book as ‘an organization’, fearful of India’s draconian secrecy laws. Subsequently, many individual officers, some still in service, were so horrified by the fiasco of the NSG’s mobilization, which had made them one day late for India’s worst ever terrorist attack, that they agreed to tell their stories. The spooks were twitchy and the state-appointed prosecutors self-serving, but they too spoke to us, on condition of anonymity. But none of these responses was as daunting as the Taj’s. Caught, tremulously, between needing to create an image for itself once more as the ‘House of Magic’, and remembering the sacrifice of staff and guests, the hotel as an institution was unresponsive at first, something especially worrying for us as it stood at the dead centre of the book we wanted to write.

  Of all the targets hit that night, the Taj was the most iconic, and for that reason it was the first to be chosen by Lashkar. For us the Taj’s story, and those of its assailants, staff, guests and liberators, was also a porthole into Chabad House, the CST massacre, and the Trident–Oberoi, giving insight into what was lost and also what was endured and overcome by everyone from the police to chawl dwellers, from the gunmen assailing the city to the NSG’s gunslingers who eventually neutralized them.

  We began slowly, building the confidence of nervous institutions, reaching out to hundreds of individual Taj staff, guests, police officers and members of the Special Forces, to eyewitnesses and participants of every kind in Mumbai and Pakistan, in Europe, the United States, South-East Asia and the Gulf States, using their memories to construct a time-line. Once we had a location and a ticking clock, we came back to several dozen crucial interviewees, many of whom have never talked before, and most of whom have undergone a remarkable change as a result of their experiences.

  We first met Bhisham Mansukhani at the height of the rush hour in 2010, grabbing a table at the crowded Pizza by the Bay, on Mumbai’s Marine Drive, not far from his Breach Candy home. He revealed that no sooner had he got out of the Taj alive than he began working out how to quit India too. Bhisham’s narrow escape left him feeling contempt for the authorities that he and many others accused of prolonging their ordeal, and disillusioned with the political impasse of cross-border relations with Pakistan. While we sipped fresh lime sodas, Bhisham took us through his memories from the Crystal Room into Chambers, talking non-stop for hours, disdainful of the Friday night crowd that seemed to have forgotten about the assaults which brought the city to a standstill at shortly after 9.40 p.m. on 26 November 2008.

  Savitri Choudhury, who spent much time with the food critic Sabina Sehgal Saikia during her last days, was still freelancing in Mumbai, this time for the Australian Nine Network, when we emailed each other arranging to meet. Sitting in her high-rise apartment, with its bird’s-eye view over many key locations, from the Bombay Hospital to the jail where Ajmal Kasab was then still incarcerated, she recalled Sabina’s last hours, dipping into their shared past too, stories that encapsulated their friendship. Savitri had arranged for her friend to be embalmed by Danny Michael Pinto later that day. ‘Dead Centre of Town’, the sign still says outside Pinto’s, marking his funeral parlour as the city’s necropolis, where Rajiv Gandhi and Mother Teresa were prepared for burial. Savitri had smiled at that board, knowing that Sabina would have loved it. She bid her a final farewell at the airport, with her husband Vikram at her side, both of them watching as the casket disappeared into the hold of a waiting passenger jet.

  Politicians, dress designers, journalists, TV stars and artists attended Sabina’s funeral in New Delhi – as she would have wished. Nikhil Segel, her brother, told us: ‘As a family we joked that if Sabina had to go, it had to be like this, in a blaze of glory. She would have hated every moment of a slow and uncelebrated death.’ Her widower, Shantanu, was more circumspect with us. He still lives in New Delhi with their sixteen-year-old son Aniruddha and their daughter Arundhati, aged nineteen.

  Mike Pollack, who took us on his journey from the Tower lobby to the Harbour Bar, and via the Wasabi restaurant to Chambers, told us how he had embraced the opportunity to change, a decision consolidated by finding a photo of himself cowering from bullets outside the Taj splashed on front pages. Staring at the photo, he saw a man who believed he was about to die. When he and Anjali returned to New York, he dissolved the hedge fund he had co-founded in 2001 and they set up the SCA Charitable Foundation to promote ‘venture philanthropy’ and provide financial backing to social entrepreneurs, primarily in India. Mike also became an adjunct professor of philosophy and business studies at New York University Stern School of Business and he manages his family’s investment firm, Pollack Holdings.

  When we contacted Will Pike it was initially through his Central London
lawyer, who was marshalling a lawsuit against the Taj. At first, Will was reluctant to tell his story. The aftermath of his fall from the third floor felt as though it would never end, he said. After more than a dozen operations and six months at Stanmore Spinal Cord Injury Centre, in North London, Will was told in February 2009 that he would never walk again. He and Kelly Doyle split up in 2011 and he has still not developed a Super 8 video film of them on the beach together in Goa before the attacks, the only surviving record of their ill-fated holiday. After five years of battling the British government, he finally won compensation as a victim of terrorism in January 2013 but his battle to come to terms with life as a paraplegic continues.

  Line Kristin Woldbeck, the Leopold Café survivor, escaped physical injury, but has never shaken off the trauma of those days. She and her boyfriend, Arne Strømme, stayed in Mumbai for a month after the attacks, an act she described as an effort ‘to heal with the city’. During this time, doctors reattached Arne’s severed fingers and sutured his slashed face. Afterwards, Line established a survivors’ network and she remains in touch with many she came into contact with on that night, including her ‘angel’, Amit Peshave, although not the family of Meetu Asrani, her Facebook friend, who bled to death in the café. Line still travels widely, most recently to Cambodia and the Andaman Islands, and describes 26/11 as her ‘rebirth’.