A hospital patient who managed to talk a man out of detonating a bomb in a maternity wing said the would-be attacker “asked for a cuddle” before standing down.
And the article concentrates on the bravery of the man who stopped the attacker…oh, no, my mistake, it does its best to humanise the man who tried to blow up a hospital ward because he had a grudge against the nurses:
Nathan Newby, who stopped an atrocity through an act of kindness, spoke publicly for the first time about his encounter with Mohammad Farooq before receiving the George Medal for bravery.
Farooq, a clinical support worker who took a viable pressure cooker bomb into St James’s hospital in Leeds intending to “kill as many nurses as possible” was jailed for at least 37 years last year. After asking for a cuddle, Farooq told Newby to “phone the police before I change my mind”.
Newby, 35, from Leeds, said he thought Farooq was “probably a nice guy” who was “going through bad things at the time”, and saw himself as someone who was “just in the right place at the right time”.
Typical British self-effacing response to honours, but why the excuses on behalf of utter barbarity? And why make the latter such a feature of the article?
During his trial, Farooq was called “a self-radicalised lone wolf terrorist”, inspired by the so-called Islamic State group, but also chose the hospital as a target as he had been a clinical support worker there and had a long-running grievance with nurses on his ward.
He said Farooq seemed “normal”, adding: “I don’t judge anybody. Everybody’s different and unique in their own ways aren’t they? I didn’t judge him.”
The State did. Rightly so. Has the 'nudge unit' been at this chap like they tried with the victims of Valdo Calocane?
