26 OCTOBER
BRITISH WITNESS GIVES HARROWING ACCOUNT OF THE EXECUTION OF INDIAN MUTINEERS AT AHMEDABAD
26 October 1857 – A British witness gave a graphic account of the bloody aftermath of the execution, by being blown apart by cannon, of Indian mutineers at Ahmedabad. It was subsequently published in several British newspapers.
“I walked straight to the scattered and smoking floor before the guns. I came first to an arm, torn off above the elbow, the fist clenched, the bone projecting several inches, bare. Then the ground sown with red grisly fragments, then a black haired head and the other arm still held together. This was the man I had watched; close by lay the lower half of the body of the next torn quite in two, and long coils of entrails twined on the ground. Then a long cloth in which one had been dressed rolled open like a floor cloth and on fire.”(1)
26 October 2003Â The United Kingdom abstained from an overwhelming vote in the UN General Assembly (144 to 4) against the Israeli separation wall. The resolution declared that the wall was “in contradiction to the relevant provisions of international law” and predicted that it would jeopardize the Middle East two-state peace plan.
Footnotes
- Account dated 26 October 1857 quoted in “Execution of Mutineers,” The Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard, 12 December 1857, p4
Copyright Alisdare Hickson 2018