It’s easy for people to say that they would die for their loved ones, but when that grim moment arrives who will actually put their life on the line to protect others? Matthew James will. The brave British man risked it all to safeguard his fiancee when terrorists attacked a beach resort in Tunisia.
ISIS radicals stormed the Marhaba Imperial Hotel and opened fired on tourists sunbathing on the beach. As the screams of innocent people and the claps of bullets launched from Kalashnikovs, Matthew acted as a human shield for his fiancee where they were enjoying a relaxing sunbathing session only minutes before. At the darkest moment when Matthew thought these were his final seconds, so he told his fiancee Sarah Wilson, “I love you babe. But just go – tell our children that their daddy loves them.”
Sarah managed to escape, but Matthew was shot three times, once in the hip, once in the pelvis and once in the chest. She said he was hit by a bullet and blood started pouring out from him. “You just can’t explain how terrible it was. It was chaos with screaming and gunshots.”
Sarah fled back to the hotel, and hid from the terrorists. Sarah described the gruesome carnage, “I ran back, past bodies on the beach to reach our hotel. It was chaos – there was a body in the hotel pool and it was just full of blood.” When she arrived at the hotel she immediately took cover, “I hid in a towel cupboard to make sure I was safe. It was dark and I could hear people walking around – it was terrifying.
Once the slaughter was over, Sarah feared her true love and the father of their two children Tegan, 6, and Kaden, 14 months, was murdered in cold blood. She frantically searched for Matthew for two hours, even peeking under sheets at the dead bodies gathered at a makeshift morgue.
Finally she received a call from Matthew, who was at a local hospital where he was receiving a life-saving operation. His pelvis was shattered and he also had a heart attack.
“It was the bravest thing I’ve ever known, said Sarah of her fiancee. “But I just had to leave him under the sunbed because the shooting just kept on coming.”
The massacre took the lives of 37 people, 13 of which were British. One eyewitness said the gunman at the hotel was deliberately allowing locals to leave, while specifically targeting Westerners. The tragic incident came on the same day of ISIS linked attacks in France, Kuwait and Syria.
“We are due to get married in the summer of 2017, said Sarah. “We will be the luckiest people alive because we have witnessed what nobody should ever see.”
[Mirror]