Fire incident
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A 24-year-old Uber driver rescued two children, 3 and 14, after he saw that their flat was on fire in the early hours of the morning on 25 February. After seeing smoke coming out of the extractor fan, Mohamed woke as many neighbours as he could and saved the children through the window.
Around 5am on Tuesday, Mohamed, who lives in a ground-floor flat, went to smoke a cigarette, unable to sleep. What first caught his attention was the sound of burning paper. "I looked up and saw black smoke coming out of the extractor fan from the flat in the block next door," said the young man, who could see the flat from the patio that the two buildings shared.
Mohamed ran to alert his mother, Fatima, who called the 112 emergency services. In the meantime, Mohamed went to the building next door and started ringing all the doorbells. He then entered the building and knocked on as many doors as he could, to get the residents out. When he arrived at the flat where the fire had originated, he started banging on the door to wake up the people living there. By then, he had already spotted the younger one of the two siblings through the window.
Mohamed's persistent knocking alarmed the neighbours, who woke up not from the fire but from the noise. With the police and fire brigade still on their way, they decided to act. "The next-door neighbour climbed out of the window and sat on the clothesline to try to get to the children to jump to him," said Fatima. "I told him not to do it; I have looked after children and I know how heavy they are. If they had jumped, they would have fallen," said Mohamed's mother.
The flames spread rapidly across the floor. "I thought quickly and said to myself: 'I'm going to save them'. I went back to my house and grabbed a big, 2.90-metre ladder we have in the courtyard," says the young man. He climbed up to the roof of the ground floor next to his own, from there he went to the adjoining building, put the ladder back and climbed up until he could reach the little boy. The two children were home alone, waiting for their parents to return from work.
Pressured by the gravity of the situation, Mohamed could only tell the children: "You're with me now, we're safe, mummy and daddy are coming." Mohamed said that the little boy couldn't stop shaking, so he held him in his arms until the parents arrived.
The two brothers were in shock. The mother tearfully embraced her children upon her arrival a few minutes later. She then hugged Mohamed to thank him for saving her family. The young man, however, believes that anyone with a little ingenuity would do the same thing, although he did acknowledge the hand of fate in the situation: "It seems that God wanted me to be awake at five in the morning...".
Residents of the building on Avenida La Luz have been praising Mohamed's bravery. "If it hadn't been for that boy..." said one neighbour. The smell of burning still lingers in the air.
The rescue mission gave Mohamed a taste of what it was to live his dream of being a firefighter. What made him reconsider the profession was the mountain of books and manuals he would have to read to become one. If there’s one job requirement he already has, it’s courage - something that cannot be learned as part of the syllabus.
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