Australian actress hid inside cupboard to escape gunfire

MELBOURNE: An Australian TV actress, who was trapped inside Mumbai's Taj Hotel when terrorists went on a shooting spree, hid herself in a two-by-three metre cupboard for an hour to escape death.

Brooke Satchwell, former star of soap opera 'Neighbours', told a radio portal that she was inside the ground-floor toilets when the attack happened and "everyone just froze".

"As I stepped into the bathroom you could hear machine-gun fire start up in the lobby," she told the radio portal.

"People started locking themselves into the toilet cubicles, which clearly wasn't a very good idea. But we were trying to find somewhere to hide," she said.

Satchwell, along with her boyfriend and about eight other foreigners, has now been moved to another hotel in south Mumbai, whose location was not disclosed for security reasons.

"I can't even get my leg dressed, we can't go to the airport, that's been bombed, we can't go to the police centres, they've been bombed," Satchwell's boyfriend told the Herald from the hotel.

Recalling her ordeal at the Taj Hotel, the actress told the portal that hotel staff directed the group into the service cupboard, where she waited for up to an hour, hearing bursts of gunfire.

"Some of the hotel security came and ushered us very quickly down the corridor and across the lobby, clearly no one had a very good idea of what happened ... or where we were meant to be heading at that stage," she said.

At least 20 Australians were in the nearby Oberoi hotel, which also came under attack, all of them members of a New South Wales delegation organised by the Department of State and Regional Development.