Till the hammer blows came, Thakiyuddin Wahid had been the living breathing man behind Indias largest but most controversial private airline. Within seven minutes, he was reduced to Case Number 596 in Bandra police station; his Mercedes odometer standing jammed at 16,420.
The East West bossman left his suburban office for his residence, barely half a kilimetre away, at 9.25 pm on Monday, November 13. He met death within minutes, just 100 yards down the road. According to inspector Vijay Mesharam, the attack took place between 9.25 and 9.30 pm. The entire operation from ambush to assassination lasted seven to eight minutes.
The attackers were lying in wait near a trench dug by telephone men. When the steel-grey car slowed down, they sprang on it. They pounded on the windshield with a hammer, then smashed both the right side windows and the rear left one, and pumped in bullets with a .38 pistol and a .45 revolver. Wahid caught 14 of those bullets, his driver Farooque Shaikh two, the back seat five. While the boss shirt and suit absorbed most of the blood that oozed out, the drivers seat was flooded with blood. The drivers survived, Wahid didnt.
Although the incident took place in a residential area and not very late in the evening, no one bothered to inform the control room. It was only when an injured Shaikh manfully drove the car with his boss dead or dying in the backseat to the nearby Bhabha Hospital that the news broke out. By then the assassins had made good their escape in their red Maruti Omni.
The ambush had been similar to the last detail to two major killings over the past year-and-a-half. Textile scion Sunil Khatau had been gunned down at a traffic signal in central Mahalaxmi, and BJP leader Ramadas Nayak had been killed when he emerged from his Bandra residence.
There are some who believe that Wahid would have had a chance of survival if the side-windows of his car had been a tough as his windshield which failed to give way despite some hefty blows on it. His attackers made three big holes on it, but to no avail.
