At 9.30pm on Wednesday Parizaad Khan had just picked up her first drink – a fruit juice – at a wedding reception in the Crystal Room on the third floor of the century-old Taj Mahal Palace hotel. For several minutes the partygoers, a mixture of Indians and foreigners, thought that the bangs outside were fireworks. Then a hail of bullets splintered one of the windows, and they realised that they were under attack.

At least seven young men, most slightly built and wearing casual clothes – denim jackets, tracksuit tops, T-shirts and jeans – were storming the lobby. Most were carrying backpacks stuffed with ammunition.

Dalbir Bains, a British businesswoman, was with friends by the hotel pool. “We heard shots and saw a man who’d just been shot,” she said. “We ran – with the terrorists following just behind us.” She ran upstairs, taking refuge in the Sea Lounge restaurant with about 50 other people. They huddled beneath tables in the dark, trying to remain silent as explosions went off. “We were trying not to draw attention to ourselves,” she said.

On the 25th floor, John Alexander, a shipping executive, was meeting a delegation of senior foreign businessmen. “We heard lots of explosions,” he said. “Part of the delegation that had tried to exit the building had been turned back. We decided to barricade ourselves in. That’s where I stayed for the next seven hours.”

A waiter also barricaded the doors of the Golden Dragon, a Chinese restaurant on the hotel’s ground floor. Diners cowered under their tables for about 30 minutes before being led through a maze of service corridors to the business centre, which quickly became an ad hoc bunker. The Crystal Room wedding party was making its way to the same sanctuary.

Elsewhere in the Taj, guests fleeing to the rear of the building away from the lobby had run straight into the path of another terrorist. Sajjid Karim, a British MEP, said: “He was at the rear gate, holding a large machinegun. He pointed it at the crowd and started to use it.”

A couple of minutes’ drive away, similar scenes were unfolding at the Oberoi hotel, another favourite haunt of Bombay’s wealthy locals and expats. Alan Jones, a businessman from South Wales, was in a lift when the man next him was shot. Mr Jones frantically attempted to pull the man back in to close the door and escape.

Later the Indian authorities would claim that about two dozen militants in their early 20s – the exact number of attackers is still not clear – had travelled by sea in inflatable boats, come ashore and fanned out across the financial and tourist districts of Bombay (also known as Mumbai). As they opened fire indiscrimately, those who could fled the scene.

The victims at the two hotels were not the first to die. One group of terrorists had headed south from the Gateway and attacked Leopold’s Café, a popular tourist haunt, riddling it with bullets and killing several people.

Another target in the same area was Nariman House, headquarters of the Jewish outreach group Chabad. Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his family, along with several others, were taken hostage – although some managed to escape through a back door, the first to elude the terrorists.

About five minutes’ drive north of the Taj Mahal hotel, another phase of the carnage was beginning. About 10.30pm, two men armed with automatic weapons walked into a restaurant at Chatrapati Shivaji terminus, India’s main railway station, a gothic beast of a building from the days of the Raj. They opened fire on the families dining there, changing their magazines three times, apparently with neither emotion nor any sense of haste. “It was a massacre,” a witness said.

About the same time, two more terrorists arrived at the Cama & Albless hospital in a hijacked Skoda and shot five people dead.

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