HOWZAT

Elsewhere in the hotel, guests were cowering in darkened rooms, trying to make themselves invisible, barely willing to whisper messages on their mobile phones to the outside.

A short walk away, at Leopold Café, a destination made popular for foreign backpackers by Gregory David Roberts’s best-selling novel Shantaram, the walls were left pocked with bullet marks and the floors streaked with blood. The wreckage of a red scooter, the remains of shop awnings and broken glass were strewn across the street.

“They shot indiscriminately,” Paul Stanley, an Australian tourist, said of the men who opened fire at the bar.

Sourav Mishra, a journalist who had been at Leopold, did not seem to know what had happened, such was the swiftness of the strike. Sharing a bed with three other people in hospital, he said: “I heard some gunshots . . . I was with my friends. Something hit me. I ran away and fell on the road. Then somebody picked me up.”

There was a “high-intensity” bomb blast at the Oberoi hotel, a regular meeting place in the heart of Bombay’s commercial district for businessmen, wealthy tourists and Bollywood starlets. It was heard across South Bombay — many people had first thought it was a firework set off to celebrate a wedding.

Sajjad Karim, an MEP for the North West of England, said: “A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me. I managed to turn away and I ran into the hotel kitchen and then we were shunted into a restaurant in the basement.”

A Spanish guest said: “I was in the restaurant inside the Oberoi and I saw this series of gunshots and death which I don’t want to see again.

“I crawled into the kitchen and waited there, until I sensed it was all quiet and seemed over.” For many, however, the darkest hours of the ordeal were only beginning.

Alex Chamberlain, who works for a sports website and was in the city on business, told Sky News that the gunmen burst into the Oberoi’s restaurant and herded diners upstairs.

He believed that the terrorists were looking for British and American visitors. “They told everybody to stop and put their hands up and asked if there were any British or Americans. My friend said to me, ‘Don’t be a hero, don’t say you are British.’

“I am sure that is what this is all about. They were talking about British and Americans specifically.”

As the gunmen continued to cause mayhem inside the hotel and smoke poured from the lobby, paramilitary forces prepared to storm the building. A similar force of heavily armed paratroopers assembled outside the Taj. If their commanders were hesitating, it was because of the fears that hostages were almost certainly being held inside.

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