The Hindu Business Line : Cama Hospital staff show courage under fire

The gates were shut and police reinforcements were rushed to the hospital, just in case the gun-men rumoured to be firing in the city decided to revisit the hospital.

P.T. Jyothi Datta

Mumbai, Nov. 28 Locked in a small inner room in a ward on one of the top floors of the Cama Hospital, four panic-stricken women hid to save themselves. Was the hospital the target of gun-men on Thursday – making it the second such attack in about 36 hours?

And sitting with these women, this correspondent got a first-hand feel of what it must have been like when the 180-odd inmates and hospital staff were held hostage by firing gun-men on Wednesday, the first night when gun-men ran amuck in the city.

Lights were put off and the few men present locked grills leading from the corridor into the ward. Feeding her new-born baby, one of the women shed silent tears, only to be comforted by a hospital staff, who said: “We will not let anything happen to you.” Panic had struck hospital inmates, as rumours of firing at the close-by G.T. Hospital forced the posse of policemen stationed outside Cama Hospital to tell inmates to rush indoors and lock-up.

The gates were shut and police reinforcements were rushed to the hospital, just in case the gun-men rumoured to be firing in the city decided to revisit the hospital they had visited on the first night of terror. Another woman in the room, changed from her white uniform into a plain-coloured sari to prevent herself from being identified with the hospital.

Fateful night

On Wednesday night too, the gun-men seemed to be looking for the hospital’s staff, Cama’s Superintendent had told Business Line, a few minutes earlier.

Recounting the fateful night’s encounter vividly, she said, the gun-men had killed two ward-boys who were in the Hospital’s security uniform, but left another who pleaded with them that he was not with the institution.

The ordeal that night had started at 10.10 p.m., when the gunmen had run into the Cama & Albless Hospital for women and children, after they had fired at people in the populous CST station. News had trickled into the servant quarters at the Hospital and its inmates shut their doors and put off lights, she said. But soon, the gun-men ran into the Hospital premises and knocked on doors, asking for food. They then ran into the Hospital where inmates were housed, killing the ward boys.

Seeing this, a hospital attendant ran up the steps, screaming to other staff to shut doors and switch off lights, which they did. The grills pulled and lights off, the hospital staff rushed patients into bathrooms for safety, the Superintendent had recounted, deeply appreciative of the staff’s show of courage under fire. And they sat in darkness, listening to the firing in the building.

The hospital’s sixth floor still bears blood-marks of the gun-men’s encounter with the commandos, the floors have grenade marks and the lift-doors and walls are dotted with bullet-marks. The terrorists were eventually killed.

But sitting in the dark room on Friday, terror seemed a heart-beat away. Just then, the men in the room decided to go downstairs and check with the police. And this correspondent took the opportunity and the police’s advice, to rush out of the hospital and catch the first fleeing taxi back to the office, driving through a panic-stricken city.

More Stories on : Terrorism | Medical Institutions & Hospitals | Maharashtra

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