Mumbai: A young British actor who played one of the London suicide bombers in a TV documentary faced real life terror attack in the Mumbai massacre and was left for dead by gunmen before being detained as a suspect by police.
Escaping death at the hands of real life terrorists, Joey Jeetun (31), who played suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer in a British television documentary 7/7: Attack on London was in Cafe Leopold, the popular tourist haunt near Taj Mahal Hotel, which was the first target of terror attack on Wednesday.
Jeetun told the London Times how he survived the attack after terrorists assumed that he was dead because he was covered in other people's blood.
'I hid inside the bathroom as they were shooting'
"It sounded like they sprayed everyone and then looked to see who was alive and then started shooting at them on the floor," he said. "After about five minutes (the shooting) stopped and I opened my eyes. There were dead people next to me who had been shot in the head."
"I was scared I was confused I was distraught ... As an actor you can play a character but this wasn't playing, it was real," he told CNN.
Jeetun from Bethnal Green, East London, said he owed his life to a stranger who jumped on him when the firing started at the Leopold cafe.
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In the chaos that followed, the Mumbai police mistook the actor for one of the terrorists and was locked in a cell for 13 hours before they were convinced he was a genuine British tourist. "I was held in a police cell for 13 hours with a group of Arab looking men. They thought I was a suspect even though I said I was a British tourist," he told another London newspaper Daily Telegraph.
Jeetun was born and raised in London and his mother is from the tropical island of Mauritius, according to his website.
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