A British-Cypriot businessman was on Thursday named as one of 125 people killed in the Mumbai attacks, hours after he gave an interview describing how he was trapped in a hotel with gunmen outside.
The British Foreign Office announced that one Briton was among the dead, and Cypriot foreign ministry officials later confirmed reports that the man was 73-year-old Andreas Liveras, a yacht tycoon who emigrated to London in 1963.
The Cyprus News Agency reported his brother Theophanis as saying that Liveras had been abducted with a large group of other diners and “assassinated in cold blood during the terrorist attacks.”
As news filtered out from Mumbai after the attacks, Liveras gave a telephone interview to the BBC from the Taj Mahal hotel, one of two luxury hotels targeted by gunmen in a series of coordinated attacks across the city.
He had heard it was the best restaurant in Mumbai, but told the British broadcaster: “As soon as we sat at the table we heard the machine gun fire outside in the corridors, everywhere.”
“We hid ourselves under the table and then they switched all the lights off. But the machine gun kept going, and they took us into the kitchen, and from there into a basement, to come up into a salon,” he said.
He estimated there were “more than 1,000 people” in the room, a mixture of residents, tourists and locals.
“We’re not hiding, we are locked in here — nobody tells us anything, the doors are locked and we are inside,” Laveras said.
“We have got hotel staff here at this moment who are helping us a lot, providing water and sandwiches. But nobody is eating really, people are frightened,” Liveras said.
He said: “It’s very quiet. The last bomb exploded about 45 minutes ago and it shook the hotel up. Nobody comes in this room and nobody goes out, and we don’t really know.”
“All we know is the bombs are next door and the hotel is shaking every time a bomb goes off,” he said.
The interviewer put to him that he must be terrified, to which Liveras replied: “Everybody is ... We are just looking at each other, and every time you hear something everybody jumps. Everybody is just living on their nerves.”
Liveras ran a chartered yacht company in Monaco where he advertised “the world’s most impressive private yachts to the charter community.”
In his online biography, he described how he worked as a delivery man for a bakery when he first arrived in London, before buying the shop and turning it into a major wholesaler. He sold it and moved into the yachting business.
Laveras was ranked 265 in the Sunday Times newspaper’s list of the richest people in the UK.
Britain’s High Commissioner to India Sir Richard Stagg earlier told the BBC that seven Britons had been injured in the attacks.
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Britain was sending specialist police officers to India to help investigators probing the attacks, and would do “whatever is necessary” to protect its citizens from the “horrific incident.”
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
The Bolivian government on Friday struck a deal with protesting miners, but was still grappling with blockades and demonstrations by other workers across La Paz. Other groups are still blocking access roads into the city, which is also the seat of the government. Police on Thursday prevented the miners from entering the main square by using tear gas, while the demonstrators hurled stones and explosives with slingshots. Protests against the policies of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz have convulsed the Andean nation since early this month, and roadblocks were choking routes into La Paz throughout Friday, the national road authority said. Miners demanded that Paz
The Philippines said it has asked the country’s Supreme Court to allow it to arrest former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s chief drug war enforcer to stand trial in an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last week unsealed an arrest warrant against Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, accusing him along with Duterte and other “coperpetrators” of the “crime against humanity of murder.” Dela Rosa briefly sought refuge in the Philippine Senate last week while asking the Philippine Supreme Court to stop an ongoing attempt by government agents to arrest him. “By his own conduct, he has placed himself outside the protection of
The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English. The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.” Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, Caedmon’s Hymn appears within some copies of
RSS