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In Just Minutes, Mumbai Was Under Siege
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The two gunmen then commandeered a police vehicle, killing three officers and wounding a fourth. The officers had been responding to a call from Cama Hospital about shots fired, said the lone survivor, police constable Arun Jadhav, who was in the vehicle but played dead.
Cama Hospital, a charity for women that is less than 10 minutes by car from the CST, had been attacked about 10:15 p.m., most likely by a separate group of gunmen. At least three hospital workers and two police officers were killed.
In the police vehicle, the gunmen sped west toward the Metro movie theater, a 70-year-old landmark about half a mile from the rail station.
The art deco theater overlooks a major traffic intersection, where the gunmen opened fire on bystanders, injuring several. From that intersection, it is a fairly straight drive south along Mahatma Gandhi Road, past the Bombay Stock Exchange, to the Taj. But the two gunmen in the vehicle were intercepted at Chowpatty, a beach on Mumbai's far west side.
Police killed one of the gunmen. The other, a 21-year-old Pakistani national named Azam Amir Kasab, was arrested. Mumbai police confirmed that Kasab was one of the shooters at the rail station.
Police said that after hours of interrogation, Kasab admitted that the operation had been launched from the Pakistani port city of Karachi, from where the attackers initially set out by boat. They reportedly hijacked a fishing trawler along the way. Police later found the trawler, along with the captain's body -- his throat cut and his hands bound with rope. The gunmen had killed the trawler's four other crew members and dumped the bodies overboard.
By the time Kasab was arrested, the sieges of the Jewish center and the Oberoi and Taj hotels were well underway. The nightmare would not end until Saturday afternoon, when police said the last of Kasab's nine comrades was killed.
"How could so few young guys take a city down?" asked Rangoli Garg, 18, nursing a leg wound suffered as she fled the Taj amid a hail of bullets. "Somehow these men owned us. They took over our city."
Correspondent Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi and special correspondent Ria Sen in Mumbai contributed to this report.
