I CRADLED DYING BOY
Brit’s Barcelona bravery
A HERO Briton told how he wept as he cradled a dying boy injured in the Barcelona van rampage.
Harry Athwal, 44, rushed from a restaurant to hold the youngster lying in Las Ramblas.
He said the little boy on the pavement reminded him of his eight-year-old son.
Harry, from Birmingham, added: “I checked for a pulse and he did not have a pulse.
“I put a hand on his back and he was not breathing, so all I could do was sit with him and stroke his hair until the police came.
“The police were screaming at me to get out of the road in case of another van but I was not going to leave this boy here.
“I have a son the same age and that was what was going through my head.”
The project manager wept openly as he comforted the youngster until emer- gency services came. British schoolboy Julian Cadman, seven, and three-yearold Javier Martinez, from Spain, have been named as among 13 to die.
Heartbreaking pictures showed Harry sitting alongside a boy’s body moments after Thursday’s attack.
He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “We’re fighting a different enemy now. They’re using everyday things like cars. They’re killing our children. You have to do something. It’s not about your safety. It’s about someone else’s.
“The common man is the person who can now do something about this.
“We’ve got to change. We’ve got to do something. The common man has to wake up, we can’t walk around with blindfolds anymore.”
Harry was in a restaurant on a first floor balcony.
He said: “You hear this screaming, thuds and thunder. You were just trying to think, ‘what have I just seen?’
“Straightaway I knew it was a terrorist attack.”
Presenter Kate Garraway wept as she said: “If it was my little boy, I would love someone to be there in that situation.”