Hotels emerging as terror magnets

MUMBAI, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- Hotel officials say they're virtually defenseless against the kinds of terrorist attacks as those perpetrated this year in Mumbai and Islamabad.

No amount of preparations could have prevented the teams of heavily armed attackers who commandeered Mumbai's Taj Mahal Palace and Oberoi luxury hotels from carrying out their plans, hotel owners told The New York Times. They say they're totally dependent on governments to stop terrorist attacks before they happen.

P.R.S. Oberoi, the chairman of the Oberoi Group, said this weekend that he ordered his company's hotels to step up security after a truck bomb killed more than 50 people two months ago at the Islamabad Marriott Hotel but he questioned whether any hotel could have defended against the Mumbai assault.

Analysts say luxury hotels in troubled parts of the world are becoming terrorism magnets and U.S. hotel company officials have noticed.

"It is incredibly difficult to have a quick-fix solution to what we saw," Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert with the Swedish National Defense College, told the Times. "You are stuck 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."