"I wasn't scared until seeing the war-like scene at the hotel lobby," Shi Xilin, survivor of the Mumbai attack, said Sunday afternoon.
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A policeman stands guard after shootings by unidentified assailants at a railway station in Mumbai November 26, 2008. [Agencies] |
Shi works as a chef for the Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant of Taj Mahal Hotel which had been captured by terrorists during the disastrous attack that lasted almost 60 hours starting from Wednesday night.
The 49-year-old Chinese chef said that he knew there were some bombing incidents happened in the city on Wednesday, but as other local people do, he has already accustomed to it as explosions often occurred there.
On Thursday morning, at about 7:45, Shi was ready to leave the staff dormitory on the third floor of the hotel to send his daughter off to study in the university. He said that sound of gunfire was heard but he thought it was from outside of the hotel.
"There was a black out in the hotel which is normal here and the lifts were out of service, then we walked down the stairs," said Shi who came from Beijing, China to India in 1990s.
When they got to the ground floor, Shi stepped on some blood and found that the lobby has become a battle field between the police and the terrorists. "That was when I realized the seriousness of the incident and started to fear," said Shi who recalled the heartquaking moment.
And there he saw a woman, whom was later known from the British Broadcast Company, crying and climbing downstairs barefoot all the way from the 18th floor.
As heavily armed anti-terrorism forces from the police marched inside the hotel, Shi was certain that something really bad had happened.
"We bend down at once and crept on the floor to avoid being shot," he said. The weapons used by the anti-terrorism forces were not that advanced and a number of them were fired down.
"It was fortunate that the most furious part of the battle was over when we got there," Shi said, adding that with the help of Indian national security soldiers, he and his daughter and some other tourists finally escaped safely from the hotel.
However, some of Shi's working partners were not that lucky. "Ten of my Indian colleagues were at the hotel kitchen during the battle. Six of them were killed and four others were injured," he said with a miserable tone.
(Xinhua News Agency December 1, 2008)