Westerners relay harrowing accounts of Mumbai chaos
A Spanish politician who survived recounts running barefoot through blood, and a British businessman who didn't gave a cellphone interview to the BBC as the mayhem unfolded.
Reporting from Madrid — Esperanza Aguirre, a prominent Spanish politician, returned home from Mumbai on Thursday only hours after landing in the Indian city. She had escaped death by running barefoot through blood.
Like the other Western survivors and victims of the attacks, Aguirre experienced firsthand the strategic agility of terrorism. It has become increasingly difficult for Islamic extremists to pull off strikes in the heart of the West, as they did with the Madrid train bombings of 2004. So they turned to targeting Westerners in a thriving commercial hub of the developing world.
Aguirre, the president of the regional government of Madrid, checked in to Mumbai's Oberoi Hotel on Wednesday with a delegation of Spanish business executives. She struck up a conversation in the lobby with a childhood friend who was visiting separately. Then the shooting started.
"Only when it turned into a machine-gun volley, clearly a sustained shootout, did I realize what was happening," Aguirre said during a televised news conference here Thursday morning. "We threw ourselves behind the reception desk."
The hotel staff "put us first in the kitchen, then the storerooms of the kitchen, then the laundry, then they took us to the offices of the manager," she said.
As the guests fled aided by hotel employees, Aguirre lost a shoe. She removed the other one and ran on, barefoot. The delegation piled into cars and zoomed back in the direction of the airport, only to encounter a traffic jam caused by an explosion. After making their way through side streets to the international terminal, they flew back to Madrid.
The diminutive Aguirre is known for an unflinching style and elegant outfits. But on Thursday, she attended reporters looking weary and rumpled in the same clothes she had worn for the trip with less-than-chic white shoes and socks that replaced the those she had lost in the carnage at the Oberoi. "I did not see the terrorists or wounded people," she said. "I didn't even know they were terrorists. I only saw the blood that I had to cross barefoot. I stepped in quite a few puddles of blood."
The gunmen who stormed 10 targets, including luxury hotels and a Jewish center, were clearly hunting for foreigners. They singled out Americans, Britons and Jews to take as hostages. Although the numbers were by no means definitive, the scores of dead included at least eight foreigners, and dozens of others were wounded, taken hostage or trapped by the chaos of gunfights and explosions.
