Wednesday, October 2nd 1968.
Dramatic footage of frontline action during the Nigerian Civil War with Federal troops pressing forward on the road to Umuahia and encountering resistance from soldiers of the secessionist army.
During the engagement, British T.V. reporter Peter Sissons (1942-2019) is shot through both of his legs and badly injured. He is seen being wheeled on an old Silver Cross pram by Nigerian troops.
These events happened near Owerri.
Source: Getty Images.
Note:
1. The Kenyan photo-journalist, Priya Ramrakha was shot and killed a few yards from Sissons during the firefight. Ramrakha had stood up during a temporary lull. Recalled Sissons in his 2012 memoir "When One Door Closes": "I heard someone say, 'We're surrounded'. There was a momentary lull. Then some more shots, and I heard Morley (Safer, CBS Correspondent) yell, 'He's been hit.' At that moment Priya Ramrahka had stood up and been shot in the back, dying almost instantly."
2. Sissons also revealed in his memoir that the British journalist and later best-selling author, Frederick Forsyth told him over 35 years later that he had been near the scene of his shooting. Forsyth, who sympathised with the Biafran cause, had been invited by a party of Biafran soldiers planning an ambush for advancing Federal troops. Sissons had been accompanying the Nigeria soldiers who had been ambushed. As he lay injured in a ditch, Sissons had called out for help "three or four times" before losing his strength. He had mentioned that he was a British journalist.
Forsyth told Sissons that he had intervened to stop the firing directed at Sissons when he found out that an English person had been hit.
Although Morley Safer, the CBS man wrote to Sissons, stating that he did not believe Forsyth's story, Sissons remained convinced that Forsyth story, barring some "poetic license" had essentially been true.
3. Sissons was eventually traced and rescued by "three or four" soldiers of the Third Marine Division commanded by Colonel Benjamin Adekunle after his colleagues had begged them to try to find their missing colleague. He was ferried to a makeshift hospital were he was treated on a bed next to the corpse of Priya Ramrahka. On the way to Port Harcourt, he shared the floor of a truck with Ramrahka's body because the Kenyan had been too tall to fit into any of the coffins the Nigerian troops had at the warfront.
4. The events in took place on the same day as the Tlatelolco Square Massacre at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico.
