New Delhi: “It was a horrific scene. Blood was splattered across my roof. There were two bodies, badly damaged. Their stomachs and their heads had cracked open. Their brains had come out,” Wali Salek, a resident of Kabul, told the Indian media in a video message.
Salek was recounting the events of Monday afternoon when two men fell off a plane they were clinging to as they tried to flee Afghanistan. Unfortunately, they lost their grip and plunged to their deaths on the rooftop of Salek’s house in Khair Khana, a suburb of Kabul.
“It sounded like a bomb blast,” the 47-year-old Salek, who works as a security guard in Kabul, was quoted as saying by Scroll.in.
All this would have been probably lost in translation, but for a young relative of Salek who lives in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar area,
The relative, Shapoor Zarifi (27), owns a travel agency and a real estate business. As Salek described the dramatic events in Pashto, Zarifi translated the video call into Hindi.
According to Salek, plaster began to crumble down from the walls and ceiling. Hearing the crash, his neighbours came out of their homes. He climbed up to the roof of his house, about 8 km away from the Hamid Karzai International Airport.
His neighbours told him that they had watched as two men holding on to the wheel of a plane had fallen off.
Three Kabul residents who were trying to leave the country by hiding next to the tire or wing of an American plane, fell on the rooftop of local people. They lost their lives due to the terrible conditions in Kabul. pic.twitter.com/Cj7xXE4vbx
— Tariq Majidi (@TariqMajidi) August 16, 2021
