TORONTO:

Hollywood actor David Rudder said his experience in movies helped him survive the terrorist attack in Mumbai.

In a TV interview on November 30 from a Mumbai hospital, the actor recalled the whole incident. “My arm ... just exploded into red. It was like a scarecrow arm inside of a second... While I was taking that in, I got a bullet in my leg,” he said.

The actor said he dove to the floor of the Oberoi hotel restaurant as a third bullet hit him in the lower back and a fourth one grazed his head.

“I just laid there in utter shock for quite a long time,” he said.

“My intention, once the bullets started flying, was to pretend — as I’ve learned in so many Second World War movies — that I was dead and just to stay as still as could,’’ he said.

When the gunman left the area, he said, he crawled out of the kitchen and fled the building to be taken to hospital in a taxi.

Rudder said his two friends were killed in the attacks.

Recalling how it all began, Rudder said when he and his friends first heard gunfire; he got up to see what was going on. But he was told by the staff that it could be some small gang warfare and he should go back to his table.

“That was my fatal error. I did go back to my table and I said: ‘Apparently, it’s some kind of gangster activity and it’s no big deal’. Five minutes later we were ... just ripped to shreds by bullets,” the actor recalled.

He said he never saw his attackers. The actor said he was in India on a spiritual pilgrimage with a Virginia-based meditation group called Synchronicity Foundation which lost a member and his daughter. — HNS