With a helicopter hovering overhead, Indian commandos on Friday morning stormed the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish center in Mumbai where hostages had been held since it was seized Wednesday by seaborne terrorists.

In the end, six of the hostages were killed, including the Brooklyn couple who operated the center.

As the thump of explosions and rattle of automatic weapons shook the six-story white building, blue-clad commandos slid down ropes from a helicopter to the roof and battled their way inside, according to witnesses.

Thoughout the day, gun battles raged in the building, Nariman House, and Reuters reported that the commandos had blown a breach in an outer wall. Late in the day, black-uniformed Indian reinforcements moved in, and a van with six medics in surgical gowns and masks was parked close by, apparently in anticipation of casualties.

Israeli officials and Lubavitch elders confirmed later that six hostages were found dead inside. They were Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, of Brooklyn, and his Israeli wife, Rivka, 28, the Lubavitch emissaries in Mumbai who ran Nariman House; another rabbi from Brooklyn who was living in Israel, Leibish Teitelbaum; Bentzion Chroman, an Israeli with dual American citizenship; an unidentified Israeli woman; and another unidentified woman, according to Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, a Lubavitch spokesman in Brooklyn, and The Associated Press.