The Mumbai massacre- reverbrations

As many of my readers know, my wife and I were held hostage in Oberoi Trident hotel during the Mumbai massacres in November of 2008. I had written about our experiences in my earliest blogs and in my book " Reflections of a curious mind". That episode and its aftermath were brought to my mind both by the killing of Osama Bin Laden and the importance of the court proceedings in Chicago of the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre.

We had returned safely from our sojorn to Mumbai in November 2008 but did not quite realize that the incident had reverbrations that still rattle. It all started with a visit from the FBI about four months after the massacre with a phone call from the FBI fixing a meeting at a neighbourhood coffee shop.

We were excited at this first meeting with the FBI having been fed on a plethora of TV programs. May be we would finally get to meet one. But when I mentioned this phone call to my ever watchful and concerned daughter, she was alarmed and angry. How do you know they were the FBI? Why did they call you? How did they locate you? How do you know it is not some scam? Why do they want to meet at Starbucks? Are they trying to involve you in some court case?

I had no answers for her. But her concern was legitimate—after all it had been four months since the terrorist incident in Mumbai in which we were held hostage. Why now?

Goaded by her concern, I decided to call the number the caller had given me. The FBI office at Maryland had not heard of this gentleman. This left us even more alarmed. In the evening I decided to call again. This time the receptionist said that perhaps he was a consultant hired by the FBI on terrorism and connected me to the consultants office. There was only a voice mail there and I left a message postponing our meeting thus hopefully compelling him to call again when I could raise all the issues Shibani had raised.

There were no calls the next day but on Thursday morning, came a call again. My wife took the call. The FBI agent said that his team was at Starbucks and waiting for me. So we decided to go and meet with them at our neighborhood Starbucks.

When we reached there, we found the FBI team had corralled a private room in Starbucks. There were three of them. Joseph… was clearly the leader of the team. He was big and beefy and looked the image of an FBI lawman. He was accompanied by his partner,….and an African American lady who was introduced as a trauma counselor.

They wanted to know of our experience during the terrorist incident in November. Ena had mentioned to them that I had written a detailed blog of our hostage experience and we handed them a copy of the blog. What was the purpose of this meeting? I asked. We are only trying to keep our records complete. How did they locate me? We had copies of all the guests at the hotel where you had given your US address. Is there any court case linkage? No, he assured me, this was primarily an effort to complete their records. But it had been four months since the incident. That was my fault, he said, I should have contacted you sooner.

We spent the next hours describing our experiences during the incident. They had a number of questions but most of their focus was on whether we had seen any of the terrorists or their accomplices. We told them that fortunately we had been inside our hotel room during the entire period and only emerged after the hostages had been killed. There was really nothing we could do to help them in terms of personal contact with the terrorists. In retrospect, I think this was the real reason the FBI had contacted us just in case we remembered or had seen some suspicious accomplices that we could identify.

As we were leaving, the trauma counsellor asked my wife whether we had been traumatized by the incident. She was a trauma counselor and was available at all times to help deal with the aftermath of such an incident. She gave Ena a form and asked her to fill it in case she needed any counseling or grief management in the future. I was impressed with the detailed followup, albeit a trifle delayed, from the FBI particularly since no one from the Indian police service had even made an effort to contact me. But there was more..

A few months later, I received an email from the Department of Justice in Chicago informing me that since I was a victim of the terror attack I would be kept fully apprised of the developments in the prosecution of the masterminds of the massacre. Since then they have remained true to their word and every once in a while information is sent on the prosecution efforts and the case.

The latest developments are best captured in this article.

Again it was an instructive period in our lives. We had narrowly escaped the massacre more by chance than anything else-- I was in the lobby perhaps thirty minutes before the massacre began, we had changed our mind at the last minute from dining at the restaurant downstairs which was the scene of a major tragedy, we had evaded being taken hostage even after our names were on a TV ticker for a brief while- and it was a relief to find that at least some investigating agencies had not given up on tracing the masterminds of this tragedy and to bring them to justice.