IPL security head recalls his experiences of the Mumbai terror attacks which he witnessed at the Taj
IPL security head recalls his experiences of the Mumbai terror attacks which he witnessed at the Taj
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A number of us from Nicholls Steyn & Associates were in the Taj Hotel when the terrorist attack happened in Mumbai. We were at a restaurant having dinner when the incident took place. We had just arrived to do security for the Champions League (which was postponed). Two of us were in India planning and the five of us had arrived the same evening. First we were told it was a shootout on the street, but after hearing two blasts and receiving information from people outside, we realised it was a terrorist attack.u00a0
We moved the people from the restaurant into the conference room next door. There were a lot of people in the conference room who did not know what was happening u2013 around 150. We kept them calm and told them what we were doing. We barricaded ourselves in. We turned off the lights and we armed ourselves with knives from the kitchen. We managed to get some radios from the hotel people. We called the elevators and opened the doors so the terrorists couldn't use the elevators.
We were told that the terrorists were making their way up the hotel because that's what happened at the other hotels. We could see them on the other side and we could hear them below us as well. We could see the shooting and grenade blasts.
We stayed there for about five hours and then we decided to get out because the fire was coming close to us. We got everybody out from the fire escape. We were very slowly making our way down because we didn't know where the terrorists were. There was a 90-year-old lady whom we had to carry down. We finally got into the street by four o'clock in the morning.
Little did we know
We did not know exactly what was going on when we were inside. We just did what we were trained to do and only after we got down, we were able to see what was going on. We could hear the blasts in the rest of the city and we knew something big was happening. We did not even realise what we had done until the media started phoning us for interviews because some of the people we had evacuated were quite high profile people.
I found the security staff from the hotel to be excellent, but the measures that were in place were not up to standard.
Security is based on the level of threats. Nobody had expected this kind of an attack so it would have been difficult to have half measures in place.
It is essential that lessons are learnt and plans made for this type of situation and others that could occur.
You can't start planning a response when things start to go wrong. You have to have your response planned before hand. You got to know what your job is before hand. So when anything happens, everybody does their job and the situation is resolved.
Why no interviews?
You would be amazed to know that to this day, nobody (the authorities) has ever interviewed us, to ask us what we saw there, what was going on etc.
I would have expected that the moment we got out that we would be stopped, taken away and interviewed to see that there is any information we could give that would be useful to them. It did not
happen.
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