Taj Mahal hotel owner: We had warning

The Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, India, temporarily increased security after being warned of a possible terrorist attack, the chairman of the company that owns the hotel said Saturday.

But Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata said those measures, which were eased shortly before this week’s terror attacks, could not have prevented gunmen from entering the hotel.

“If I look at what we had … it could not have stopped what took place,” Tata said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that will air Sunday.

“It’s ironic that we did have such a warning, and we did have some measures,” Tata said, without elaborating on the warning or when security measures were enacted. “People couldn’t park their cars in the portico, where you had to go through a metal detector.”

- from CNN

At the end of a three-day standoff with militants amid a gunfight and a blazing fire Saturday at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, the removal of the bodies from the ruins of the 105-year-old landmark began.

At the main city hospital morgue, relatives clutched one another in grief as they went to identify their dead. By midafternoon, the morgue was running out of body bags, and by evening the death toll had risen to 172, a figure that was sure to rise once the dead from the Taj hotel were counted. Funerals went on throughout the day.

As the reckoning began after the siege here, troubling questions arose about whether Indian authorities could have anticipated the attack, taken better security precautions in a city as vulnerable as Mumbai, the country’s financial capital, or crushed the attackers more swiftly. – from IHT

The morning after the standoff ended at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, the official death toll remained 172. But the police said they were still waiting for the final figures of dead bodies pulled from the wreckage from the hotel, a 105-year-old landmark. Funerals were scheduled to continue throughout Sunday, for the second day in a row.

As an investigation moved forward, there were questions about whether Indian authorities could have anticipated the attack and had better security in place, especially after a 2007 report to Parliament that the country’s shores were inadequately protected from infiltration by sea — which is how the attackers sneaked into Mumbai.

- from NYTimes