Are hotels magnets for terrorists?

LONDON — Consider how a city looks to a terrorist seeking targets.

There's the airport — inviting, but heavily secured. There's the U.S. Embassy, perimeter guarded by crack local forces and Marines. And there's the plush international hotel, open to anyone with a decent outfit and money for a cup of coffee.

For decades, luxury hotels have been oases for travelers in developing countries, places to mingle with the local elite, enjoy a lavish meal or a dip in the pool and sleep in a clean, safe room.

But last week's lethal attacks on two of India's most famous hotels — coming just two months after a huge truck bomb devastated the Marriott in Islamabad, Pakistan — have underlined the extent to which these hotels are becoming magnets for terrorists.

Worse, hotel executives and security experts say little can be done to stop extensively trained gunmen with assault rifles and grenades who launch attacks like the ones that left Mumbai's Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels strewed with bodies.

P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, said at a news conference over the weekend that he had directed his company's hotels to step up security after the Islamabad bombing. The Oberoi banned anyone from parking in front of its hotel in Mumbai for fear a car bomb could destroy the glass wall at the front of the lobby, a risk at many hotels.

But those protections did not deter the attackers, who entered the Oberoi on foot.

P.R.S. Oberoi questioned whether any hotel could defend against such an assault.

"The authorities have to help us," he said, by preventing attacks from occurring at all.

The Taj, it turns out, had warning, according to both an Indian government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and Ratan Tata, the chairman of the company that owns the hotel. In an interview on CNN, Tata said the hotel had temporarily increased security after being warned of a possible terrorist attack. But he said those measures were eased shortly before last week's attacks and could not have prevented gunmen from entering the hotel.

U.S. hotel chains have policies against discussing security precautions but watched the Mumbai hotel sieges closely.

"We never talk about security measures in our hotels because to talk about what we do would compromise them, but I think it's fair to say what happened in Mumbai is going to re-energize them," said Vivian Deuschl, the spokeswoman for the Ritz Carlton Hotel, a Marriott subsidiary.

Precautions

Some hotels in Asia already take elaborate precautions, particularly in countries with histories of attacks on Western luxury hotels.

At the Grand Hyatt in Jakarta, Indonesia, for example, guards check the trunks of all vehicles and even use mirrors to check cars' underbodies for explosives before letting them drive to the entrance. Guests' baggage is opened and checked by hand for suspicious objects, and everyone must go through a metal detector before entering the building.

In Pakistan's major cities, where hotels have been targets for years, already-tight security at some hotels has become even more intrusive since the Marriott bombing. Guests have to pass through at least one, and often, several security checkpoints on their way into the hotels; some are staffed by paramilitaries. At the luxury Serena Hotel in Islamabad, those who wish to enter are grilled about where they are going and whom they are meeting.

But security experts say such measures — and even some lesser ones — will be difficult to implement outside of war zones or countries where hotels already have been made targets, even after the attacks in Mumbai.

"It is incredibly difficult to have a quick-fix solution to what we saw," said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert with the Swedish National Defense College. "You are struck with the dilemma of having a complete lockdown. Tourists don't want that. They want to participate in the culture, they want to experience it."

Hotels have some built-in design problems for those seeking to protect them from terrorists. Long hallways can turn into dangerous mazes during the type of attacks that occurred in Mumbai. And the Oberoi and the old wing of the Taj hotel, where most of the fighting took place, both have high, central atriums, like many hotels. This proved to be a vulnerability.

After throwing grenades and directing automatic weapons fire at staff and diners in ground-floor lobbies and restaurants, the attackers at each hotel ascended the atriums. This allowed them to hunt down guests while dropping grenades and shooting at commandos below.

The Oberoi Group employs many plainclothes security officers in its hotels, but they are unarmed, Oberoi said.

J.K. Dutt, the director general of India's National Security Guard, the commando force that took the lead in the fighting, said in a televised news conference Sunday that the hardest terrorist to attack in the Taj hotel was one who ascended a spiral staircase and took up a position behind an extremely thick pillar that was part of the 105-year-old building's original structure.

Particularly at the Taj, the attackers seemed to have a detailed knowledge of the building's layout, Dutt said. They kept moving among large halls with multiple entrances, not allowing themselves to be cornered in small rooms with no other exit.

By contrast, the commandos and police had old blueprints of the massive, labyrinthine hotel that did not clearly show which passageways were connected and which were blocked by walls, and did not show recent construction, Dutt said.

The police and first-response agencies should be working with the hotel industry to devise crisis action plans that would include computer programs detailing all internal and external aspects of hotel building structures, said Michael Coldrick, a London-based security professional and a former explosives specialist with Scotland Yard. For example, a prerecorded DVD walk-through of a hotel could be used to brief special-forces assault teams to make sure that they know what to expect.

Hotels may also ask staff to keep a closer eye on customers. At some point, Coldrick said, "We might see cleaning ladies with explosives detectors."

In the end, several security experts say, no security system is foolproof.

The Marriott in Islamabad, which had been struck in the past, had layers of security in place on the night the truck bomber approached. The truck was stopped by security guards at a gate who checked vehicles before allowing them through a hydraulic barrier.

Those precautions are credited with saving lives; the truck never made it past the barrier and closer to the hotel where the blast would have been more devastating. Still, more than 50 people died and more than 250 were wounded.

"The threat against diplomatic targets persists, but due to target hardening, the terrorists seek to attack international hotels," terrorism analyst Rohan Gunaratna said in a report on the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott. "As Westerners frequent such hotels, they should be considered second embassies."