8-year-old who nailed Kasab now a young woman waiting for govt to keep its word

Mumbai, Nov 25 The brave 8-year-old Mumbai girl Devika Rotawan who survived a terrorist bullet during the 26/11 terror strikes has now bloomed into a chirpy young woman, but a tad crestfallen at the ‘unkept promise of getting her own house from the government.

At the height of the terror strikes by 10 Pakistani jihadis, Ajmal Amir Kasab was the sole terrorist captured alive, and after a trial lasting almost four years and exhausting all legal remedies, he was hanged on November 21, 2012.

It was Devika's critical evidence as the star witness which crumbled the cocky Kasab's chameleonic web of lies and fibs in the trial watched by the world.

Kasab, along with nine other heavily armed Pakistani terrorists, unleashed unprecedented and bloody mayhem in the country's commercial capital for nearly 60 hours as people globally watched in horror.

A total of 166 people were killed, plus nine attackers in the 60-hour concentrated assault within barely a five-sq.km. radius in south Mumbai.

Another 300 persons were injured, among them the little Devika, who took a bullet in the leg as Kasab and his associate lurking there, sprayed bullets indiscriminately at the crowd inside the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus building that dark night.

Now 23, Devika remembers clearly how she waited with her father Natwarlal Rotawan to board a train for Pune to visit her brother, Bharat, 35, and his family.

"Just then, we heard several gunshots and deafening booming sounds, people shrieking, crying, running helter-skelter. We were caught in the middle of the chaos and melee," Devika told , recounting that horrible living nightmare.

Attempting to escape like the others, she stumbled, felt a numbing pain and saw blood gushing from her right leg she had been shot.

"Even as I realised it, I fell and passed out right there, regaining consciousness only the next day," said Devika, reliving the petrifying sights and sounds of that deadly night in her mind.

Amid the confusion, she was somehow rushed to the nearby Sir J. J. Hospital and then underwent a major surgery the next day to extricate the AK-47 bullet lodged in her right leg.

That was just the first of her multiple visits to the hospital, several surgeries over the next six months, and six major operations in the subsequent three years that enabled her to regain complete mobility and independence.

"Devika was so small then… She had lost her mother Sarika just two years ago… Along with my two other older sons, we jointly took care of her despite great challenges and little financial help for her education or future," remembers her doting father Natwarlal Rotawan, who was also one of the prime prosecution witnesses in the 26/11 trial.

Admitting that those three years were nightmarish for the entire family, Devika shifted to her native Sumerpur village in Pali district

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