Terrorists looked like boys

Australian victims of the terror attack in the popular Leopold café have described the terrorists as ‘young boys”.

The description came from two young Australian tourists, David Coker (23) and his partner Katie Anstee (24), who were among the first to come face-to-face with the terrorists in the city’s famous bar in Colaba.

‘They looked just like boys and they were on a rampage — It was full on.”

Coker and Anstee had arrived in the city to celebrate their graduation and they went to eat at Leopold, when terrorists struck.

‘We had just sat down for dinner and were ordering food when it seemed fire crackers were blowing up all around us and people were screaming,” the duo told the Sydney’s ­Courier-Mail newspaper by telephone.

Anstee was shot in the leg, with the bullet breaking her femur, while Coker was grazed by a bullet. Coker said he had to virtually carry his girlfriend as she couldn’t move.

‘We got into a taxi which took us to Bombay hospital. We were, I think, the first people at hospital, which is where we are now,” said the pair.

Another Australian, TV actress Brooke Satchwell, also had a harrowing ordeal in a confrontation with another group of terrorist boys in the city’s landmark Taj hotel.

Satchwell hid herself in a 2mx3m cupboard for an hour to escape death.

The former star of soap opera Neighbours told a radio portal that she was inside the ground-floor toilets when the attack happened and ‘everyone just froze”.

‘As I stepped into the bathroom I could hear machine-gun fire start up in the lobby,” Satchwell said.

‘People started locking themselves into the toilet cubicles, which clearly wasn’t a very good idea. But we were trying to find somewhere to hide,” she said.

Satchwell, with her boyfriend and about eight other foreigners, has now been moved to another hotel in south Mumbai.

‘I can’t get my leg dressed, we can’t go to the airport, that’s been bombed, we can’t go to the police centres, they’ve been bombed.”

A 49-year-old Australian was ‘brought dead” to St George’s Hospital in South Mumbai late Wednesday night.

‘I saw a frightened cop run away’
Daily News & Analysis reporter Preeti Acharya was caught in the crossfire between terrorists and police at the Taj hotel

I was assigned to get eyewitness accounts from The Taj but ended up becoming an eyewitness myself to a gun battle between the police and terrorists.

I reached The Taj about 10.45pm after visiting another attack site, the Leopold Café in Colaba. I saw policemen cordoning off the hotel to trap holed-up terrorists.

No one was being allowed past the barriers, but I somehow sneaked in. Once inside I came to know that the terrorists were on the sixth floor. They tried to take people in rooms hostage, but didn’t succeed as the rooms were locked.

Minutes later policemen tried to reach the upper floors, but were stopped in their tracks by grenades hurled by the terrorists. I saw at least three grenades fly.

After the second grenade exploded, shattering glasses and shaking the entire hotel building, I was reduced to tears.
Seeing me shaking in fear, a constable offered solace, but soon began crying himself as the terrorists opened another round of fire.

The policeman had realised his colleagues had left him alone and moved to the other side of the hotel. He told me his rifle could fire only one round and then he ran away, leaving me and an Italian photographer (I later came to know as Lorenzo Tugnoli) on our own.–