London, May 10: Five months after he fell a
victim to the Mumbai terror attack, 29-year old Will Pike who
faces lifetime on a wheelchair feels "let down" and has
accused the UK Foreign Office of indifference and neglect of
Britons falling victims to terror attacks abroad.
It is only now that he felt strong enough to talk
about his "nightmare" and his terrible sense of abandonment by
many of the institutions he had hoped would help him.
As a sequel, politicians from all parties have called
for compensation for UK citizens who have been injured or
disabled in terror attacks.
The clamour for action was sparked by the plight of
Pike who faces a lifetime in a wheelchair.
He is having to cope with just 15,000 pounds in help
from a government-backed Red Cross fund. Like others, Pike
returned home to find he was not covered by the compensation
scheme set up after the July 7, 2005 bombings in London to
help all victims of terror attacks, of whatever nationality,
on UK soil.
He said he felt terribly "let down", at a time when he
had hoped the government and the Prime Minister would show
condolence and care.
Pike along with Kelly Doyle had just checked in for
one night at the Taj Mahal hotel at the end of two-week
holiday in Goa when he became a victim of the terror attack
last November.
Pike, a film-maker with a commercials production
company and his girlfriend Kelly, were in their third-floor
bedroom changing before dinner when they heard what sounded
like shots in the atrium overlooking reception.
Looking outside, they saw what appeared to be gunsmoke
and returned to their room. Trapped and terrified, Will rang
his father, Nigel, in London. "I could hardly hear him because
he was whispering," Nigel told The Observer.
After hiding in the room for five hours, they made an
impromptu rope out of sheets, curtains and towels and Will
volunteered to go ahead to make sure it was safe. But the
knots did not hold. "It was almost like an out-of-body
experience," Pike told the newspaper.
"I can almost see the expression on my face as I
fell," he said. "I don`t remember landing. I just have some
hazy recollection of seeing a bone sticking out of my left
wrist."
A passer-by saw him lying there and called out to
Kelly not to follow her boyfriend out of the window. The fire
brigade appeared; a firefighter plucked Kelly from the room
and an ambulance took Will to a local hospital.
He was treated for a broken vertebra, a fractured
pelvis, a smashed right elbow and a mangled wrist. Crucially,
he also sustained a spiral cord injury depriving him of all
but limited sensation and function below the waist.
Bureau Report
