London: Five months after he fell a victim to the Mumbai terror attack, 29-year old Will Pike who faces a lifetime on a wheelchair feels "let down" and has accused the UK Foreign Office of indifference and neglect of Britons falling victims to terror attacks abroad.
It is only now that he felt strong enough to talk about his "nightmare" and his terrible sense of abandonment by many of the institutions he had hoped would help him.
As a sequel, politicians from all parties have called for compensation for UK citizens who have been injured or disabled in terror attacks.
The clamour for action was sparked by the plight of Pike who faces a lifetime in a wheelchair.
He is having to cope with just 15,000 pounds in help from a government-backed Red Cross fund. Like others, Pike returned home to find he was not covered by the compensation scheme set up after the July 7, 2005 bombings in London to help all victims of terror attacks, of whatever nationality, on UK soil.
He said he felt terribly "let down", at a time when he had hoped the government and the prime minister would show condolence and care.
Pike along with Kelly Doyle had just checked in for one night at the Taj Mahal hotel at the end of two-week holiday in Goa when he became a victim of the terror attack last November.
Pike, a film-maker with a commercials production company and his girlfriend Kelly, were in their third-floor bedroom changing before dinner when they heard what sounded like shots in the atrium overlooking reception.
Looking outside, they saw what appeared to be gunsmoke and returned to their room. Trapped and terrified, Will rang his father, Nigel, in London. "I could hardly hear him because he was whispering," Nigel told The Observer.
After hiding in the room for five hours, they made an impromptu rope out of sheets, curtains and towels and Will volunteered to go ahead to make sure it was safe. But the knots did not hold. "It was almost like an out-of-body experience," Pike told the newspaper.
"I can almost see the expression on my face as I fell," he said. "I don't remember landing. I just have some hazy recollection of seeing a bone sticking out of my left wrist."
A passer-by saw him lying there and called out to Kelly not to follow her boyfriend out of the window. The fire brigade appeared; a firefighter plucked Kelly from the room and an ambulance took Will to a local hospital.
He was treated for a broken vertebra, a fractured pelvis, a smashed right elbow and a mangled wrist. Crucially, he also sustained a spiral cord injury depriving him of all but limited sensation and function below the waist.
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