Double miracle In Mali

For several long hours, Omar Goro believed he was the unluckiest man in Mali, and then, suddenly, he knew he was the luckiest man in the world.

Under the shade of a spreading neem tree in the village of Dogofri, men, women and children gathered to listen to his tale. Mr Goro, a farmer, almost became a victim of the conflict when he found himself handcuffed to the back seat of a pickup truck filled with alQaeda militants at night as a French Mirage jet swooped from the sky above.

His audience gasped as his story reached its climax. Then they smiled and laughed, shook his hand and asked to have their picture taken with him.

‘‘It all started on Thursday night,’’ said Mr Goro. He was on his motorcycle, riding without lights near the rebel-held town of Diabaly, when he encountered a column of rebel trucks as they set out to flee northwards from the advancing French.

They took him for a government spy, beat him and handcuffed him to the open rear seat of one of their pickup vehicles. As they pressed three rifles into his side, he prepared himself to die.

‘‘We went north until we reached Nampala, 115 kilometres,’’ he said. The heavily armed fighters from Ansar Dine, allies of al Qaeda, were a mix of men from a host of North and West African countries, including Mali, Mauritania, Libya and Algeria. Fearing that their large numbers made them a target, the column of more than 40 rebel pickups separated in Nampala into groups of four, making for the desert without lights. And still they kept Mr Goro.

About 1.30am, they heard the sound of aircraft. Mr Goro begged repeatedly to be released. Eventually, the driver passed back the key, but it was too dark to see and his guard could not find the keyhole as the vehicle bumped over the desert, sparsely dotted with trees.

‘‘We were still driving when we saw the shooting of a plane and heard the whistling of bombs,’’ Mr Goro said.

Seconds later, the three vehicles in front blew up one by one. In the last pickup, all three fighters bolted with their guns and the key to the handcuffs.

Mr Goro paused in his story as his audience waited to hear about what should have been his final seconds.

‘‘I started to pray to God,’’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘‘I said thank you. It is by your will. No-one will know my grave, but if I die, it is by your will.

‘‘Then the plane shot my vehicle.’’ He heard the sound of the missile, a descending whistle. The next thing he knew he was lying on the ground, still attached to one half of a pair of handcuffs and with a deep laceration in his wrist. ‘‘It was like a miracle.’’

With a magician’s flourish, he produced one half of a pair of handcuffs. It was old and heavy, and stamped: ‘‘Made in England’’.

Mr Goro’s survival appears to have depended on a rotating link. It had proved to be the weakest link.

‘‘The rest of the handcuff is still in that burnt-out truck,’’ he said.

But his account was far from finished. ‘‘I didn’t lose consciousness and I was trying to crawl,’’ he said.

He crouched down on all fours to demonstrate. He tried, he said, to reach the shelter of a bush as the French jet screamed overhead, but the bush was already providing cover for the two militants.

‘‘They signalled to me to go away. I hid in another bush and the plane hit those two in their bush. They were dead. How has the experience affected him? ‘‘Even now I am not myself.’’