Mumbai, the gateway to India, has been stormed by terrorists.

A city in siege and a horrified nation watched perhaps the most audacious attack by terrorists at home as heavily armed men, with automatic weapons, grenades and low-intensity bombs, struck at least nine locations killing over 70 people and wounding some 200.

Landmark symbols of cosmopolitanism and affluence as well as public hubs were targeted. The dead included top police officers such as the chief of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad Hemant Karkare, Additional Commissioner (East) Ashok Kamte and encounter specialist Inspector Vijay Salaskar. All were killed fighting the attackers.

The attacks, sophisticated and co-ordinated on a scale never seen before, continued well into the night as reports trickled in of fresh explosions and continuing gun battles.

Two of the suspected attackers were shot dead in an encounter near the popular and crowded Girgaum Chowpatty off Marine Drive a little after midnight. But there was no immediate information available about the identity of those attackers or their accomplices, some of whom were seen by witnesses carrying automatic rifles and carrying haversacks.

The attacks began in south Mumbai around 9.30 pm as the business district wound up for the day and hotels and restaurants were filled with guests — a sharp contrast to the serial blasts on local trains in July 2006 which targeted passengers during peak commute hour after work.

The targets included two five-star hotels, the historic Taj Mahal hotel near the Gateway of India and the Trident in Nariman Point; Café Leopold, a restaurant popular with locals and foreign tourists in Colaba; the crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station or Victoria Terminus (VT) as it was earlier called, from where the violence spread to the nearby Metro Cinema multiplex; a taxi under a flyover in Vile Parle; and another taxi near the Dockyard Road station.

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