TV review: Terror Attack: Mumbai

Published on Wednesday 25 November 2009 19:11

Terror Attack: Mumbai More 4

EXACTLY a year ago today, ten young Pakistani terrorists sailed into Mumbai, India, and unleashed an explosion of wanton death and destruction. Armed with grenades, AK-47s and plastic explosives, as well as mobile phones and global positioning systems connecting them to their "handlers", their mission had a simple objective: to wreak indiscriminate carnage and kidnap the world's attention. Or, according to Turkish holidaymaker Seyfi Muezzinoglu, who was one of the hundreds of terrorised guests staying at Mumbai's Oberoi Hotel, "there was no plan, they just wanted to kill as many as possible".

Muezzinoglu and his wife, Meltem, were among the survivors featured in Terror Attack: Mumbai, a compelling account of one of the most shocking terrorist attacks of recent times. This documentary didn't seek to analyse the terrorists' wider motives (which could probably be explained on the back of a fag packet anyway), nor did it examine in depth the delayed rescue effort. Instead, it concentrated on the surreal, nightmarish ordeal of the ordinary people caught up in the attack. This put us squarely in their shoes, forcing us to imagine – uneasily, explicitly – how we would cope in such a harrowing situation.

Typically, it revealed that humans often act in unexpected ways – ways even they themselves could never possibly have foreseen – when placed in extreme danger. Take, for instance, the selfless actions of Amit Peshave, the youthful restaurant manager at the besieged Taj Mahal Hotel. Although his first instinct, as soon as the terrorists started firing, was to escape through a nearby exit, he decided instead to remain at his post. "I just couldn't have left my guests," he said. This appeared to reflect the attitude of the staff of both hotels: while vowing to protect a guest, one of Peshave's colleagues, a chef, eventually became one of more than 100 people murdered during the attack.

The programme – gilded by tastefully discreet dramatic reconstructions – also stressed the double-edged role played by the marvels of modern communication. Guests hiding in the hotels used their phones to send and gather vital information from the outside world. One survivor told how a colleague received a floorplan of the hotel e-mailed from his mother back home.

Unfortunately, in an act of quite incomprehensible stupidity, an Indian MP staying at the Taj also used his phone to unwittingly reveal the whereabouts of his fellow guests during a live radio interview. "That is good news!" exclaimed one of the terrorist chieftains, captured in official telephone transcripts. "Everything is being recorded by the media. Inflict maximum damage." That could be this decade's epitaph.

The barbarism of the terrorists was leavened by the humanity of the survivors, many of whom expressed sympathy for, in the words of hotel guest Michael Pollack, these "doped-up kids who were brainwashed and made into dispensable robots". Even American tourist Alison Markell, who lost her husband in the attack, could sympathise with their radicalised plight. Such compassion offered a single ray of hope in an otherwise devastating account of senseless horror. Without wishing to tumble into a trough of clich, these survivors displayed a quiet triumph of the human spirit, to which this necessarily disturbing programme paid powerful tribute.