Posted on 11/23/2009 1:38:05 AM PST by cold start
The manager of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, Karambir Singh Kang, had no idea that a fraught conversation with his wife Niti in the early hours of November 27 last year would be the couple’s last.
Niti was barricaded with their sons Uday, 14, and Samar, 5, in the bathroom of the family’s sixth-floor suite at the hotel in Mumbai as terrorists rampaged through its corridors with guns and grenades.
Kang was pinned down under heavy fire in the ornate ground floor lobby as he tried to evacuate panic-stricken guests and keep in touch with his family by phone.
“I asked them to stay in the room as it was the safest place for them. Had they stepped out, they would have been shot at. We didn’t know that [the terrorists] would set the rooms on fire deliberately,” he said.
Kang still finds it hard to talk about their final call. “It was around 3am when I last spoke to my wife,” he said. “When she told me that there was smoke coming from the doors, I asked her to use wet towels to block it and said I would come to get her.
“I could not reach them due to smoke, fire, gunshots and grenade explosions all around and the commandos had not arrived by then. The fire brigade didn’t have their orders to come in and the terrorists were firing at them.”
As he realised that there was nobody to help rescue his family, Kang was unable even to say a few words of comfort to his young sons.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Knowing the hotel as well as he did...
..if it were any one of you men in Freeperland ...
..wouldn't you grab a gun or guns and blast your way to your family's room....
..and not just leave them there?
Wouldn't you rather die trying to protect your family...
..or at least make it to the room and die with them...
..rather than stay at your counter, cowering....or helping strangers escape while your family is begging for help.
Just asking
Thanks, I didn’t know...
and in the meanwhile, the US cowers.
you couldn’t have known — only the US is smart enough to arm it’s citizens. In the rest of the world, people cower because the only guns are in the hands of the bad guys.
Not all of us!....not even most of us!
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