‘There Was Blood Everywhere’

On Wednesday night in Mumbai, 38-year-old Toronto businessman Raynor Burke was headed for the reception desk of the Taj Mahal hotel when an unremarkable evening suddenly became a night of unimaginable terror. As the sounds of automatic weapon fire were heard outside, the crowd in the hotel lobby watched as men and women outside ducked for cover.

"We were all pretty much on edge, when a man with a machine gun entered the lobby," says Burke, who spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter in Mumbai on Saturday. "The crowd moved toward him, I think because they were worried and thought he was the police. The man pointed his machine gun at them and just mowed them down—maybe eight of them, maybe 10—it's hard to say."

Shocked by what he had just witnessed and not knowing what else to do, Burke sprinted from the lobby toward the swimming pool in the hotel's center courtyard. "I ran outside and saw a dead man and woman, and they must have been middle-aged," Burke recalls. "Well dressed and well fed, one of them was still holding a wine bottle. It was an awful scene, there was blood everywhere and I slipped and fell to the ground. So I thought the shooters must be out here too."

Frightened, Burke ran back to the hotel lobby just in time to see groups of hotel guests being corralled into groups by the gunmen and led into the basement, below the lobby. "I knew that I didn't want to go with them, I knew that was not a good place to be, so I took off again up a flight of stairs leading up to the mezzanine area," he says.

He ran past an endless series of meeting rooms, salons and offices. "I don't know what I thinking, except that I had to get out of the hotel so I dove through a window and landed in a huge pile of trash below." Burke says that he never felt the pain from the fall and the cuts and bruises on his arms. "I hid for maybe an hour and a half in a nearby alley in some trash behind a parked car."

From his hiding position he could hear people shouting, and he saw the flash of explosions and heard more automatic weapons. "The pain was starting to get to me, and I knew that I wasn't far enough away. I didn't want to move away from my hiding spot, but I just knew that I wasn't far enough away," he says.

Burke ran from the alley and onto one of the main streets near the hotel, where he saw a cab driver and began shouting at him. "I had to manhandle him, I gave him 10,000 rupees, I think, and then forced my way into his cab," Burke says. The taxi driver cruised through the neighborhood streets for more than an hour before he finally forced Burke from the car.

"I had no idea where I was, and I had no idea what I supposed to do, until finally I walked up to a building that belonged to a religious society and they let me in, they gave me shelter." Burke says that he was asked by the members of that group not to release the name of the society or of their religion for fear of reprisal. "I stayed there for sometime, and it was there that I was able to contact my family and friends in Canada and let them know that I was OK."

He was hoping to leave India and return to Canada on Saturday.

© 2008