Shamim fights lonely battle in Lahore

Lahore: As India and Pakistan debate on how to question the victims of the Samjhauta Express blasts, nine-year-old Shamim is caught between two Governments who still can't trust each other.

With his face almost melted away and his charred lungs unable to breathe without a ventilator, Shamim is fighting to live at Lahore's Mayo Hospital. His in pain so intense his screams don't reach his lips—only his tears roll down silently.

Just hours before, Shamim was in Delhi's Safdarjang Hospital. With 50 per cent burns all over his body, his condition was critical.

Yet he, along with six others in equally critical condition, were airlifted to Lahore late on Thursday night against the advice of Indian and Pakistani doctors.

A special flight — Pakistan's air force C-130 — brought Shamim to Lahore and Pakistani authorities claim that the plane was equipped to handle injured people.

But the question being asked on both sides of the border is — why was Pakistan in such a hurry to get these critically injured people out of India? "They said they didn't inform us because they did not have our phone number," says Shamim's cousin, Mohd Wasim.

Now, doctors of Mayo hospital say he is lucky to have survived. "He should not have been transported. He is in a critical condition. We have taken a risk, but he is all right now," says senior professor at Mayo Hospital, Dr Sayeed Millat Hussain.

For the team of doctors treating Shamim, it's not a question of duty, they are trying to do their best for a little boy who — as of now — has no one expect them. "He is conscious and is responding. I pray to god that he gets well," says Shamim's attendant, Alia Asleem.

Shamim is unaware that his father and elder brother have been killed in the Samjhauta blasts and in a cruel twist of fate, his eldest brother, looking for Shamim, reached Delhi the same day he was flown back to Lahore.

However, Shamim will lie on his hospital bed in Lahore fighting his pain alone, till his brother Sayeed returns from Delhi on the next Samjautha Express after six long days.