H
HagiaSophia
Guest
A BBC journalist who was paralysed after being shot six times by terrorists in Saudi Arabia has vowed to return to work early next year, declaring: “You can’t keep me off air.”
In his first interview since the shooting in June, Frank Gardner, the corporation’s security correspondent, said on the BBC’s Today programme that the trauma of being riddled with bullets at point-blank range had affected only his body, not his mind…
“… saw in the faces of the gunmen absolute hatred; they had pressed the button of violence and nothing I tried to say to them in Arabic was going to dissuade them,” Mr Gardner said.
"As far as they were concerned I was a heathen, a Western infidel who had come into their area and this was an opportunity to execute a Westerner. It was quite terrifying, as you can imagine.
“These people were hard-core militants, I don’t think it would be fair to say they were paid-up members of al-Qaeda, but they were certainly sympathisers. These were people of the same mentality as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s people in Iraq.”
After the gunmen drove off, Mr Gardner began crying out desperately for help, already aware that his legs seemed paralysed. To his dismay, locals in the western Suweidi district – reputed to harbour supporters of Osama bin Laden – appeared either unwilling or simply scared to be seen helping a Westerner.
Television footage of him lying injured in a pool of blood was later broadcast in Britain, highlighted vividly the agonising delays that he had to face before help arrived.
"It was a long time before anyone came and when they did they weren’t any help at all. The local people – very uncharacteristically for Muslims, who are normally fantastically good at helping people in trouble – stood around and just discussed me.
“Eventually the crowd built up, and the police turned up, no ambulance, and they bundled me in a police car and took me off on an agonising journey to a pretty ropey hospital. By the time they got me to the operating theatre I was screaming for painkillers, which they gave me, then I went under the knife.”
Mr Gardner said that he believed that if he had not managed to get an SOS message to the British Embassy, he was sure he would have died at the hands of inexperienced surgeons. …"
telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/26/nfrank26.xml
In his first interview since the shooting in June, Frank Gardner, the corporation’s security correspondent, said on the BBC’s Today programme that the trauma of being riddled with bullets at point-blank range had affected only his body, not his mind…
“… saw in the faces of the gunmen absolute hatred; they had pressed the button of violence and nothing I tried to say to them in Arabic was going to dissuade them,” Mr Gardner said.
"As far as they were concerned I was a heathen, a Western infidel who had come into their area and this was an opportunity to execute a Westerner. It was quite terrifying, as you can imagine.
“These people were hard-core militants, I don’t think it would be fair to say they were paid-up members of al-Qaeda, but they were certainly sympathisers. These were people of the same mentality as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s people in Iraq.”
After the gunmen drove off, Mr Gardner began crying out desperately for help, already aware that his legs seemed paralysed. To his dismay, locals in the western Suweidi district – reputed to harbour supporters of Osama bin Laden – appeared either unwilling or simply scared to be seen helping a Westerner.
Television footage of him lying injured in a pool of blood was later broadcast in Britain, highlighted vividly the agonising delays that he had to face before help arrived.
"It was a long time before anyone came and when they did they weren’t any help at all. The local people – very uncharacteristically for Muslims, who are normally fantastically good at helping people in trouble – stood around and just discussed me.
“Eventually the crowd built up, and the police turned up, no ambulance, and they bundled me in a police car and took me off on an agonising journey to a pretty ropey hospital. By the time they got me to the operating theatre I was screaming for painkillers, which they gave me, then I went under the knife.”
Mr Gardner said that he believed that if he had not managed to get an SOS message to the British Embassy, he was sure he would have died at the hands of inexperienced surgeons. …"
telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/26/nfrank26.xml