an unusual cuddle

jamesDCjamesDC
in General

From yesterday's Guardian:

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.

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”.

The judge who sentenced Farooq, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, said Newby’s “decency and kindness on 20 January 2023 prevented an atrocity in a maternity wing of a major British hospital”

Comments

  • SolarisSolaris

    Wow...

  • BlessedEnergy4UBlessedEnergy4U

    This gave me chills ….

  • GoodingGooding

    I sometimes think the world has never been this lonely, it is insane

  • BearBear

    @Gooding that’s probably true. Just thinking about what you said. I was gonna say 200 years ago when there was an electronic communication it was similar, but that’s not true either. People talk to each other in community and there is not much community anymore. People will talk via phone to each other

  • pmvinespmvines

    Great , now there will be people who try to say that not getting cuddles will lead to mass killings, and not that they are an actual psychopath or suffering from major mental health issues

  • SolarisSolaris

    Yeah, people will say that. Some already do, more or less.

    If we are ever going to fix this awful mess we are in, we need all the information and understanding we can get. For this one guy, physical affection played a role in whether or not he wanted to kill people, as dark as that sounds.

    Psychopathy and metal illness are definitely major driving forces in the lives of violent offenders like this. And there's no way that a few hugs are going to cure anyone of this. We should not be naive and we should not delude ourselves.

    But the lack of love in a person's life, of a person who wants to commit the most unloving act imaginable, is a variable that should be discussed. I think that, at least in some cases, more love would help achieve better outcomes for people with mental illness. And every person who is helped or saved helps us all in some way.

    Even in this case, the fact that this guy was disuaded from killing many people because of a cuddle means that some of these potential killers are reachable. And if one person reads this story and sees a way to intervene with love, and a positive outcome is achieved, then the discussion is worthwhile.

  • situation5situation5

    Sadly, there is a moral decline where people no longer believe in good or evil, thinking they are nothing more than religious concepts, when it's nothing to do with that. There are truly evil people out there, and there are truly good natured people out there.

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