LONDON: A 37-year-old Pakistani-origin doctor, who spent 48 hours saving the lives of victims of Manchester terror attack, was racially abused and called a terrorist after being told to "go back to your country", media reports said today.
Naveed Yasin, a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon, was on his way back to Salford Royal Hospital to continue to help the victims when a middle-aged man pulled up beside him and hurled abuse at him.
He was called a "brown, P*** b******" and a "terrorist" by a thug in a van after spending two days operating on people injured in the blast, the Manchester Evening News reported.
"Go back to your country, you terrorist. We don't want you people here!," the man said. "I can't take away the hatred he had for me because of my skin colour...and the prejudices he had associated with this," Yasin said.
Yasin was born and brought up in Keighley, West Yorkshire. He lives in Trafford with his wife and two daughters.
His great-grandfather moved to Yorkshire from Pakistan in the 1960s.
"Terror attacks don't discriminate against race or religion but this [the racial abuse] didn't discriminate either," he said.
Yasin also said that treating the seriously injured victims was incredibly distressing.
"The injuries patients have had include horrific [damage] to limbs, typical bomb-blast injuries," he said.
Yasin added that his daughter could have been among the victims. His eldest daughter Amelia, 11, had wanted to go to the targeted Ariana Grande concert, but he and his wife Firdaus ruled against it because it was on a school night.
Yasin said that he and his colleagues had found working on the victims of last week's suicide bombing at Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena that killed 22 people, to be an "extremely profound and traumatising experience".
British police yesterday conducted fresh raids in Manchester and arrested a 19-year-old man in connection with the concert bombing, taking the total number of those in custody over the attack to 13.