'I Thought I Was Gone. It Was More Comfortable to Feel I Wouldn't Live'

Lynne and Kenneth Shaw, from Penarth, south Wales, spent 11 hours hiding in a succession of rooms at the Taj Mahal. Lynne Shaw told the BBC:

"We huddled under our table cuddling each other. At about six in the morning we decided there was a chance that we weren't going to escape. It looked pretty desperate. Suddenly, at nine o'clock somebody burst into the room. He was shouting very clearly 'stand up, stand up, hands up'." Confused, Shaw did not realise the men were Indian soldiers who would save them. "I thought we were going to be executed. They had us down in a stairwell and I really thought 'this is it, they're going to take us out here' ... The carnage was indescribable: blood and guts, bullet cases. We came out in the foyer. It bore no relation to the foyer I had seen at six in the evening. It was totally destroyed ... fire damage, machine gun bullets, glass, blood everywhere."

An Indian doctor, PN Vaswani, had gone to see a patient at the Taj Mahal hotel and left when commandos arrived the next morning. He told Times Now TV:

"I was coming out of the premises when I suddenly heard a lot of firing and heard some people screaming 'retreat'.

Thinking it may have been a gang war, I immediately went back to the room and called my wife saying that I was at room no 912 of the hotel ... I was numb, speechless with fear. It was like I had a blackout ... I can't forget the sight as we were walking out - there was blood, bodies and glass all around."

An unidentified Indian businessman was in a first floor suite at the Taj Mahal.

"There was this man, a very old man, lying on the stairway," he told Times Now TV. "He'd been shot in the stomach and was bleeding heavily. There was nothing we could do. We had to switch off the lights and the air conditioning. We just had to wait. At that point I felt I was gone. I was much more comfortable feeling like I wasn't going to make it. From everything we'd heard, this man was going to come to every room and spray us with ammunition."

Jennifer and Mark, a middle-aged couple, learned terrorists were in their hotel, the Taj Mahal, through a text message from their daughter in Australia:

"We spent 16 hours in complete silence, with all the lights and TV shut off," Mark told the Times of India. "We were only communicating via SMS. We only hoped that the terrorists didn't barge into our room on the sixth floor." At 1pm on Thursday, they saw a commando outside. "He told us to remain silent and returned after a while. We walked down the flight of stairs. We were shocked beyond belief. We knew it was serious, but when we saw bodies strewn on the floor in pools of blood, we realized the intensity of the attack."