Karachi, Aug 28 (PTI) Munir Ahmed has come back from the dead, literally.
But on Wednesday, three days after he was supposed to be dead, the 50-year-old driver still can’t forget the nightmare which he and three other drivers and the passengers on their four trucks faced on Sunday night.
Militants of the banned Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) launched a series of terror attacks in four areas of the restive Balochistan province and Ahmed was caught in the one on the highway Rarashim area of Musakhel district, about 450 km northeast of Quetta, the capital of Balochistan.
On the intervening night between Sunday and Monday, as many as 70 people were killed, including 37 security personnel and civilians, by the BLA, which later claimed responsibility for the assaults.
The militants shot dead 23 people in cold blood after making them come down from the truck and checking their ethnicity through their national identity cards.
With five bullets pierced into his body – arms and back – Ahmed was initially thought to have died, but miraculously, survived. But he can’t forget how his fellow drivers and passengers were gunned down.
“We were a convoy of four trucks. Near Rarashim, in the night, armed men in groups signalled us to stop. I immediately knew something terrible was going to happen (to us) as I had read about the killings in Balochistan,” Ahmed told a local contact from his hospital bed in Quetta on Wednesday.
“I think we had travelled for an hour and a half from Quetta when we were stopped,” Ahmed, who belongs to Attock in Punjab, said adding, he and others started reciting Kalma as soon as they were ordered down by the gunmen, who had their faces masked with big turbans.
“They lined us up and after shooting us, dumped our bodies on the roadside. I was shot five times. But the rescuers who were putting my body in an ambulance informed the medical teams I still had a pulse,” Ahmed added.
“I don’t know how I survived.” PTI CORR NPK AKJ NPK NPK
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