MIRACLE OF THE TALIBAN SCHOOL MASSACRE
A SCHOOLBOY paralysed in one of the most appalling terror attacks of recent years is making a ‘miracle recovery’ thanks to a British medical team.
Muhammad Ibrahim Khan was left for dead after being peppered with bullets by Taliban terrorists, who burst into his school in Pakistan last December and slaughtered 132 children, one of them just five years old. They also killed about a dozen staff at the Army Public School in Peshawar, burning one teacher alive in front of her pupils.
Muhammad was shot five times, with one bullet shattering the base of his spine. Fragments from the AK-47 round exploded into the bone, leaving him effectively paralysed from the waist down. Left bedridden for months, he was told by doctors he would never walk again.
Despite a televised appeal in his native Pakistan and the support of celebrities including Imran Khan, no one seemed able to help.
But now surgeons at The Harley Street Clinic in London have succeeded in ‘making the impossible, possible’, i n the words of his emotional father, and Muhammad has now taken his first tentative steps unaided after a painstaking six-hour operation.
Neurosurgeon Irfan Malik said last night: ‘We took a chance on him, and a week after the operation we started to see a miracle recovery. He has made much more progress than we had expected.’
Muhammad, 13, and his brother Asad, 15, were among hundreds of boys who had gathered in the school’s assembly hall on the morning of December 16. The teenager recalled: ‘We heard gunfire outside – a lot of it. The gunmen came through a door in the rear of the auditorium and started shooting all the boys in the back. Everyone tried to escape but the other doors were locked. It was complete panic.’
Muhammad says that he and his brother kicked a door down and, with others, helped about two dozen fellow pupils out of the room. But Muhammad went back into the auditorium to assist a friend who had been shot, and was himself hit.
He recalled: ‘The first got me in the shoulder. Then I was shot four times in the back and stomach and I collapsed on the floor.’
With the bodies of fellow pupils littered around him, Muhammad lay on the floor waiting for death. ‘As the gunmen went passed they stomped on my head, twice, and twice on my body,’ he said. He lost consciousness. When he woke up, heavily sedated in a hospital bed, he could not move his legs. There he stayed for eight long months, his hopes of ever walking fading by the day. His mother Shebano, 45, said: ‘When Muhammad was in hospital, month after month, I would cry day and night.
‘I would sit by him and watch his feet, to see if there would be a miracle and that they would move. They did not, and the hope dimmed. I became broken inside.’
Politicians and celebrities including Imran Khan came to visit, with the former cricketer even promising help, but nothing materialised. Increasingly desperate, they broadcast a television appeal for help.
A local property developer called Riyaz Malik got in touch, offering to pay the cost of surgery – if a hospital would operate. Muhammad’s father Sher Khan, 53, said: ‘We contacted hospitals in India, Singapore, Cambodia and Greece but none could help.’ A team from the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Birmingham, where Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai was treated after being shot by the Taliban, flew to see Muhammad. But despite extensive experience of wounded soldiers, the team said there was nothing they could do.
Mr Khan said they were unable to break it to their son that he would probably be paralysed for ever. Their benefactor, who knew the surgeon’s work, contacted Mr Malik. The Pakistani-trained doctor, an expert in complex spinal surgery who came to Britain 15 years ago, agreed to look at the notes. He said yesterday: ‘I decided to take a chance.’
The Harley Street Clinic agreed to accept less than the £50,000 the operation and associated care would normally cost. Mr Malik said Muhammad was an extremely tricky case. The bullet that shattered one of his vertebrae was designed to fragment on impact to cause maximum damage, meaning shrapnel was embedded in the spine. Furthermore, in the eight months since the shooting, the broken vertebra had set awkwardly, putting intense pressure on the spinal nerves, which had themselves become sheathed in scar tissue.
‘It was a mess,’ Mr Malik summarised. ‘When he arrived here he was completely bedridden, he could not even move his trunk from side to side. I did not hold out any huge hope that he would get any better after surgery, but I thought we should give it a try.’
Muhammad underwent the sixhour operation on August 28 with
‘Gunmen stomped on my head as I waited to die’ ‘He’ll be able to run and play, like he did before’
Mr Malik and colleague Professor Thomas Carlstedt, a specialist nerve surgeon, resetting the vertebrae, paring away layers of scar tissue from the nerves, and unblocking spinal-cord openings.
For the first week after surgery, there was little progress. But then the boy started moving his legs, then he began sitting up – and finally he asked for a Zimmer frame.
Last weekend, some ten days after surgery, he took his first tentative steps with the frame. He has since started making steps without it.
Mr Malik said: ‘He has started walking now. His parents have taken him out to the park, and he is recovering well. I expect him to be walking on his own – without a frame or help – within three to six months.
‘His mother has told me that she now cries not because of her son was injured in the attack, but because she never thought her child would stand and walk again. They are tears of happiness.’
Mr Khan said: ‘We are overcome with joy. Muhammad has been given a new life, and we have this ray of light that he will be able to return to school, to run and to play, like he did before the attack.’
Muhammad said: ‘I thought I would never walk again. But now I know I will go back to school, and enjoy my life. At last I have hope.’