Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus was the scene of carnage last November after Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, with his partner Ismail Khan, opened fire on commuters.
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Dr. Sushil Sonawane was on duty on the second floor that night at Cama and Albless Hospital, and he recalls hearing the first shots at about 10:15. The building Qasab and Khan had chosen was an unlikely source of hostages--a public hospital for poor women and children, funded by a wealthy Mumbai family. The second floor was the neonatal intensive-care unit, and one of the eight people killed at the hospital was a relative visiting the maternity ward. Sonawane said he and the other doctors locked the doors of the unit and tried to keep everyone quiet as the grenades went off, causing the entire building to vibrate. "We put the babies on the breasts of the mothers to stop the crying," he said. Five police officers were killed in an intense exchange of fire, along with two ward clerks.
Having failed to find any hostages, Qasab and Khan left the same way they had come and met a police vehicle carrying three top officials, including the chief of the state's antiterrorism squad. "One police officer got down from the said vehicle and started firing at us," Qasab says in his statement. "One bullet hit my hand and my AK-47 dropped down. I bent to pick it up when the second bullet hit me on the same hand." But his partner managed to shoot and kill all three of the senior officers. Khan pulled out the bodies and drove away.
By now, the other gunmen had begun the siege of Mumbai, terrorizing the occupants of the Taj, the Oberoi and Nariman House. Qasab and Khan drove almost aimlessly through the streets. They ditched the police car, which had a flat tire, and took a white Skoda, ejecting three women without hurting them. Veering toward the sea, they bypassed the Oberoi on Marine Drive before being stopped by a barricade the police had set up ahead of them at the Girgaon Chaupati intersection.
Interviews with three of the police officers who were there reveal the last moments of Qasab's mission. Khan tried to make a U-turn but bumped into a concrete median. The car stopped, and the officers ran toward it. Khan started shooting from the driver's seat and was killed by police fire. Qasab first put up his hands as if to surrender, but when police officers opened the car door, he leaped out and dropped with his back to the ground, guns blazing. An unarmed assistant subinspector, Tukaram Ombale, grabbed the barrel of Qasab's AK-47 and was killed. Police then beat Qasab with their lathi sticks until he was unconscious. One officer remembers that Qasab looked different from Khan, the driver of the car. "The driver looked like an angry man," the police officer said. "The other one looks normal."
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