Mumbai Terror Attacks: The Photographer Who Took the Terrorist's Photograph

The Belfast Telegraph interviews Mumbai Mirror pictures editor, Sebastian D'Souza. He's the man that took the now ubiquitous photograph of a young terrorist striding - nonchalantly it seems - toward his victims, his gun drawn and his backpack strapped around his shoulders.

By Sebastian D'Souza, Mumbai Mirror

Sebastian D'Souza, a picture editor at the Mumbai Mirror, whose offices are just opposite the city's Chhatrapati Shivaji station, heard the gunfire erupt and ran towards the terminus. "I ran into the first carriage of one of the trains on the platform to try and get a shot but couldn't get a good angle, so I moved to the second carriage and waited for the gunmen to walk by," he said. "They were shooting from waist height and fired at anything that moved. I briefly had time to take a couple of frames using a telephoto lens. I think they saw me taking photographs but they didn't seem to care."

[...]

"Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop," he recalled. "The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down."

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."

[...]

I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera."

Updated to add a link to Desipundit which in turn links exhaustively to blogs on the Mumbai attacks.