PAKISTAN: Kashmiri father relates harrowing tale of his six-years-old's rescue from school rubble

Record ID: 174165

  • Title: PAKISTAN: Kashmiri father relates harrowing tale of his six-years-old's rescue from school rubble
  • Date: 17th October 2005
  • Summary: RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN (OCTOBER 16, 2005) (REUTERS) EXTERIOR OF MILITARY HOSPITAL RESCUED CHILD, ABDUS SAMI, SLEEPING FATHER WATCHING OVER SAMI MORE OF SAMI (SOUNDBITE) (English) MOHAMMAD NAZEER KHAN, FATHER OF RESCUED CHILD, SAYING: "As I was searching, I kept calling him. He recognised my voice and called back." MORE OF SAMI (SOUNDBITE) (English) MOHAMMAD NAZEER KHAN, FATHER OF RESCUED CHILD, SAYING: " I pulled out one of his legs but I could not pull out the other leg. Then I left him there." MORE OF SAMI (SOUNDBITE) (English) MOHAMMAD NAZEER KHAN, FATHER OF RESCUED CHILD, SAYING: "Early the next morning, I went back and called him. He said: 'I am alive'. So I went to him and gave him water and biscuits. I tried very hard but could not get him out. So I told him to say a prayer and I came out again." SAMI BEING ASKED IF HE WOULD LIKE TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL, SAYING :"NO" VARIOUS OF OTHER INJURED CHILDREN
  • Embargoed: 1st November 2005 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Pakistan
  • Country: Pakistan
  • Topics: Disasters / Accidents / Natural catastrophes,People
  • Reuters ID: LVA95HUV9IF3N8SUX4HN1HNWSA95
  • Story Text: Six-year-old Abdus Sami sleeps peacefully on a bed in the Military Hospital in Rawalpindi, the bandaged stump of his left leg propped up on a red rolled-up blanket.
    His father, Mohammad Nazeer Khan, standing beside the sleeping child, says he keeps rubbing his eyes to make sure he is not dreaming that his child is alive. Sami was trapped under the rubble of the school which he had joined barely a month before a massive earthquake pulverised a wide region in Kashmir and the Northern areas of Pakistan, killing nearly 40,000 people. He was pulled out nearly three days after the quake from under a steel beam that had pinned his legs, numbing them. Khan, a health care worker from Chinari, a small village in Pakistani Kashmir, says he rushed to the school after the earthquake, only to find it razed to the ground. Along with a few other distraught parents who had also reached the spot, Khan started pulling out huge chunks of concrete in the hope of finding a chink in the rubble.
    "As I was searching, I kept calling him," Khan told Reuters Television. "He recognised my voice and called back." Hours later, Khan burrowed his way through the pitch dark to find Sami lying beside four dead classmates. "I pulled out one of his legs but I could not pull out the other leg. Then I left him there," Khan said. He says he left the child in the dark to get help but got caught in pulling out family members who were buried under his house.
    Eleven family members and a relative on a visit from Srinagar in Indian Kashmir were pulled out dead. His wife and three children escaped with severe bruises, but an older son and daughter are in hospital with broken legs and ribs. "Early the next morning, I went back and called him. He said: 'I am alive'. So I went to him and gave him water and biscuits," Khan said. "I tried very hard but could not get him out. So I told him to say a prayer and I came out again." Meanwhile, Khan's wife managed to get hold of some soldiers and brought them to the school. Khan says when the soldiers were pulling the out, they wanted to cut off his left leg, but the mother became hysterical. So a soldier lay down under the beam and started chiselling the beam with a hammer until the beam gave way a little. Sami was pulled out. But in the process his leg was very badly injured." A day later, Sami was brought to Islamabad by a military helicopter where his leg was amputated. Sami's tragedy is all too common, as schools and colleges were full when the quake struck just before nine a.m. There an estimated 62,000 injured, and many other parents have become separated from children who have been evacuated to Islamabad and other cities for treatment.
    Doctors say they are amazed by the way children are coping with the situation but psychologists feel it is because things have perhaps not yet fully registered in their minds.
    But one thing has certainly registered in Sami's mind: school is a dangerous place. Khan says the first thing the child said on being brought out was that he never ever wanted to go to school again.

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