Hamid Nazir Bhat, 16, a kashmiri teen underwent an eye operation and will have to face another surgery soon because he has lost vision in his right eye pierced by pellets the police fired during a protest.
Nearly a hundred of these tiny iron balls have pierced his skull, lips, jaws, nose and brain.
Hamid, a student of Class X, was on his way to his tuition centre, got caught in the middle of a protest and suffered serious pellet wounds during a protest demonstration in his village, Palhalan, in north Kashmir on Thursday.
Doctors treating him point out that he was hit in the head by over a 100 pellets.
According to Waseem Rashid, an ophthalmologist at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Bemina, the high-velocity pellets caused a vitreous haemorrhage in the right eye, and now his left eye holds out the only hope.
“He had a corneal-limbal tear in the right eye, and we operated on it on Saturday. But he has no vision in it, and it seems he will not able to see with that eye again,” the doctor said.
Hamid’s family members allege that he was shot from a close range. “The distance between Hamid and the policeman who fired the pellets was just a few feet. It has caused huge damage,” says his uncle Yusuf-ul-Umer.
But the police allege that Hamid is a part of the event, “the boy was part of the crowd which pelted stones at the security personnel on Thursday evening,” says a police official.
Pellet guns are non-lethal weapons used by security forces to break up protests and disperse protesters.