'I grabbed the baby and ran'
2008-11-27 15:38
Afula - Relatives of an Israeli couple trapped in a Jewish centre taken over by gunmen in the Indian city of Mumbai gathered in prayer at a family home on Thursday, desperately trying to find out whether their loved ones were safe.
The family of Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivki, said they knew nothing beyond reports that the couple's two-year-old son had been rescued, but eight people in the building were "unconscious".
"We are praying that everything will be OK. We are still in a state of uncertainty," said Mrs Holtzberg's father, Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg.
After praying together at Rosenberg's home in the northern Israeli town of Afula, family members were expected to head to India.
Rabbi Holtzberg is the main representative at a centre run by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group Chabad Lubavitch. The gunmen, believed to be Muslim extremists, stormed the house as part of a series of co-ordinated attacks across Mumbai late on Wednesday that killed more than 100 people.
Early on Thursday, Sandra Samuel, a woman who worked at the centre and had been barricaded inside, came out of the building with the couple's two-year-old son, Moshe.
"I took the child, I just grabbed the baby and ran out," said Samuel, 44, who has worked as a cook for the centre for the last five years. She said the boy was safe, but his blood-soaked pants indicated that others had been harmed.
She said that as she ran out, she saw four people lying on the floor, apparently "unconscious".
Chabad runs a network of centres around the world, giving Israelis and other Jewish travellers a place to pray, eat kosher food and celebrate Jewish holidays. A Chabad spokesperson said there were eight Israelis inside the house, including Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife.
"We have no information other than the grandson managed to get out alive and we hope our daughter and her husband will be OK," said Rosenberg.
"They have been in Mumbai for five years and their whole cause is to do good deeds for people."
He said he had spoken to his daughter on Wednesday and "everything was normal".
Dozens of Indian commandos on Thursday surrounded the five-storey building, where heavy curtains hung behind windows broken by gunfire.
Outside the centre, thousands of people stood in the narrow alleyways watching the standoff.
- AP