Nariman House cook recalls night of horror

MUMBAI: Qazi Zakir Hussain, the 33-year-old cook who used to prepare kosher food for Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, deposed in court on Thursday. Hussain narrated how he and baby Moshe's nanny, Sandra, hid behind a refrigerator during the first night of the 26/11 terrorist attack on Nariman House and managed to escape with the infant the following morning.
Hussain said that on the night of November 26, 2008, the couple had invited four guests for dinner. "When I was about to climb down from the first floor, I saw a man with a gun on the second floor. When I asked him who he was, he shot at me. By that time Sandra also came out. We hid behind a refrigerator in a store room on the first floor. We turned off the lights and shut the door,'' Hussain told special prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam.
He said that Gavriel and Rivka were stuck on the second floor of the building. "We kept hearing sounds of gunfire from inside the building,'' Hussain said. Sandra and he managed to escape from Nariman House at around 11 am the next day. "As soon as we got out, we heard a child crying. Both of us ran up to the second floor and saw Moshe there. Sandra picked him up and we came down,'' said Hussain.
On Thursday, Judge M L Tahaliyani also issued summons to Manpreet Vohra, joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs. Vohra had received a dossier from Pakistan, which said that one of the accused in the attack, Faheem Ansari, had obtained a Pakistani passport using fake documents.