“One night, somebody decided to kill us,” said Greenville resident Dr. Dennis G. O’Brien, a survivor of last week’s terrorist attack at the plush, five-star Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel in Mumbai, India’s financial district.
O’Brien and his traveling companion, C. Rich Diffenderffer were together on a business trip to the subcontinent to help the people of India and to bring jobs back to the state of Delaware when the 60-hour siege began.
O’Brien and Diffenderffer, also from Greenville, described the horrific story to the media Tuesday afternoon at the Montchanin Inn -- of the night a small group of terrorists entered the hotel last week and began to open fire with AK-47 rifles and 9 mm pistols.
The pair had just returned to their rooms around 9:30 p.m. after enjoying dinner at the hotel’s Golden Dragon Restaurant.
“Ten minutes later, everyone in the restaurant was under fire or dead," O’Brien said. "They had films of the restaurant after things had calmed down, and the table next to ours had been turned over, it had blood all over it, with bullet holes in it, and there but for the grace of God were we.”
“If we had stayed for dessert, we would have been dead,” said O’Brien, who had returned to his third floor room.
Diffenderffer went to the hotel’s business center to send e-mails. While there, he heard a sound like “large lockers being dropped from above; it sounded like ‘Bam, Bam.' ” He asked a business center employee what was happening, and was told to return to his room.
On route to the fifth floor, Diffenderffer looked into the hotel’s atrium and witnessed a young man with a machine gun on his hip shooting up into a crowd of people.
“It was like a James Bond movie,” said the 73-year-old Diffenderffer, “only this was real, it was really happening.”
The men detailed how they barricaded themselves in their rooms, waiting anxiously for some news. About three hours later, the Mumbai firemen rescued Diffenderffer from his fifth-floor room with a fire truck.
At the hotel, a fire continued to burn hours after it began on the top floor of the 565-room, century-old Victorian building reportedly popular among Western tourists and diplomats.
O’Brien said he was concerned for his friend, and considered running down the hallway and up the stairs to find him, “but there was too much smoke in the hallway and I went back to my room.”
