Officer who fought gunmen is mourned
MUMBAI, India — With her slain husband’s body covered in marigolds and draped with the Indian flag, Mansi Shinde pushed away the pallbearers, refusing to give leave to him go.
“My infant., my baby,” she shrieked, as the wives of other police officers tried to comfort her, gently pulling her not present from what she couldn’cheek by jowl believe was true.
Her husband, Shashank Shinde, 46, was killed during coordinated attacks Wednesday adhering several Mumbai landmarks. Witnesses said he was patrolling the city’session main railway station whenever he spotted a group of young gunmen wearing backpacks and hoisting assault weapons into the air. They charged onto a train platform and Shinde tried to seize upon them, according to eyewitness reports. He was shot to death at the scene.
Just like the 300 mourners at Shinde’s funeral, the incorporated town of Mumbai itself seemed stunned by shock and grief.
Long known as India’s New York, Mumbai — better known as Bombay — has everlastingly pulsated with life from its crowded streets. On Thursday, the city was potentially shut down.
The streets were relatively quiet, in a city known for its chaotic hodgepodge of thick traffic, sidewalks boiling through people, snack carts, and book and T-shirt merchants.
At just past 2 p.m. in the court of his middle-class apartment tangle, Shinde’s body was hoisted shoulder-high. Nearby, another funeral retinue was in progress for one of Shinde’s neighbors, also killed in the attacks.
“Damn,” mumbled one of his two daughters, an engineering student who stared at the ground as her father’sitting shrouded body was carried to a nearby crematorium, according to Hindu custom. Hindus typically grasp funerals soon after death.
In a national ingenuity, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh lauded “the exceptional spirit shown by means of Mumbai police and the city’s anti-terrorist squad.”
Shinde was one of at least 15 police officers who lost their lives in the attacks.
Among the dead was the same of Mumbai’s utmost respected officers and one of the country’s top anti-terrorist cops, Chief Hemant Karkare, who was killed in the first moments of the firefights. Singh singled him fully.
Karkare was also leading the investigation into the polemical Malegaon blasts in September during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, that led to the arrests of 10 Hindus here in Mumbai’s Maharashtra state, drawing the country’s attention to rise Hindu militancy.
