COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - The Sri Lankan players cracked jokes and listened to music. Some called home. The coach took a cat nap. Everyone seemed relaxed as their luxury bus headed to the cricket stadium for their match against Pakistan.
"Then all of a sudden, all hell broke loose," Sri Lankan coach Trevor Bayliss said.
Gunfire tore through the bus. Explosions rattled nearby. The players huddled on the floor, yelling out one after the other that they'd been hit. And it seemed as if no one fired back, players said.
For several terrifying minutes Tuesday, the Sri Lankan cricket team lay helpless, under siege by a band of gunmen armed with assault rifles, grenades and rockets who ambushed their convoy outside the cricket stadium in Lahore, Pakistan. The attack killed six police officers and a car driver and wounded seven of the athletes, an umpire and one of Sri Lanka's coaches.
Though other teams had refused to play in Pakistan, fearing the escalating chaos caused by Islamic insurgents, Sri Lanka agreed after being assured its most cherished sportsmen would receive the same level of security accorded a visiting head of state, team captain Mahela Jayawardene said Wednesday.
The players said they felt comfortable and sank into their usual routines as they left the hotel at 8:30 a.m. for the 15-minute drive to the stadium in a convoy of police jeeps, motorcycles and an ambulance, players and the coach said.
Kumar Sangakkara talked about going out shopping after the match. Jayawardene grew frustrated that his wife was not answering his phone calls. Bayliss was trying to sleep off a raging headache. Other players laughed and joked.
As the convoy approached a traffic circle outside the stadium, two explosions and a burst of gunfire rang out.
Tillakaratne Dilshan, a player sitting in his ritual pre-game seat at the front of the bus, saw two white cars race toward the convoy in reverse. One slammed into the traffic circle, then the driver climbed out and began shooting toward the bus driver, he said. Two more gunmen got out of the second car and joined the attack.
"I shouted, 'They are shooting at us, everyone down,'" Dilshan said.
Other players first thought someone had set off firecrackers.
"Our immediate reaction was to step out and see what's the noise, why are we stopping," Sangakkara said.
Then Jayawardene looked out the window and saw two police officers on a motorcycle trying to avoid the bullets before falling to the ground.
Mehar Khalil, the Pakistani bus driver, said between 10 and 12 young attackers ambushed the bus. Some stood in the road shooting at the police escorts, others fired from the center of the traffic circle. Some attacked from behind the convoy, he said.
One fired a rocket, but it missed, Khalil said. Others threw two hand grenades, but they also missed, he said.
The athletes and coaches scrambled to the floor, squeezing into the aisle and between rows of seats for safety.
"After that, we were just hearing bullet after bullet thump into the bus. We were hearing gunshots, a few explosions and you could see bullets sometimes hitting a seat," Sangakkara said.
"It was just a constant barrage of bullets," Jayawardene said. "We don't know which direction it was coming from. It was just all over."
The team didn't panic, even when the bullets began finding their mark, Bayliss said.
"Everything was very calm and very quiet, and every now and then someone would say, 'I'm hit,' and then someone else said, 'So am I,' and someone else said, 'I'm hit as well,'" he said.
Jayawardene felt his foot go numb. A bullet had grazed his ankle.
Tharanga Paranavithana, who suffered a gunshot wound to the chest, mumbled something. Sangakkara turned to listen when a bullet zipped past his head and slammed into a seat. Then, shrapnel tore through his shoulder.
Lying next to him, Thilan Samaraweera was shot in the leg and crawled down the aisle to hide his head behind a metal casing for protection, Sangakkara said.
The bus stood still for about a minute and a half as the attackers fired at will, the players said. As far as the players could tell, there was no police gunfire at the attackers.
"They were not under pressure ... nobody was firing at them," Jayawardene said.
Many of the players thought they would never make it out alive.
"I felt my life was finished. I thought they were going to shoot me or blast the bus," Dilshan said.
People in the front began yelling, "Go, go, go," and the driver fumbled with the gears before slowly maneuvering the bus around the assailants' cars and the two police escort cars that had been stopped in the attack, the players said.
It took several minutes for him to guide the bus into the stadium, all the while bullets flying past, they said.
After making it to safety, the players heard sporadic bursts of gunfire outside for another 10 minutes, Sangakkara said.
The players and officials in the stadium carried the wounded into a locker room.
The bus was drenched in blood. The driver counted 35 bullet holes.
"All the seats had bullet holes in the them," Jayawardene said. "If we had stayed in the seats, we would have been dead."
