HE was due to be married yesterday on the deceptively beautiful island Philippine island of Cebu in front of 150 guests from all over the world but instead he is now lying in intensive care in a local hospital after being shot and critically wounded while having a drink with his fiancee.
Tarek Naggar, aged 44, who is from Milngavie, was the victim of a robbery, presumably picked on because he was a foreigner and looked comparatively prosperous. The men who shot him got away with his wallet and all the local money he had on him, less than £10 sterling.
Tarek was sitting outside a bar in Cebu City, a city with a population of two million, in the early hours of Thursday morning with fiancee Angie. She is local, from Cebu, from Cebu, and Tarek, who has travelled extensively and was latterly living in Sweden, met her there. The two were intending to move to Thailand where Angie had fixed up a job teaching English.
With the couple was Chris McLaughlin, from Bearsden, who was to be Tarek's best man. The two have known each other since they were kids. Chris had arrived on the island only a few hours before the shooting with a kilt for the groom to wear at the wedding.
He was several feet away from the couple, talking to a group of local people, when a motor scooter with three men clinging to it pulled up alongside Tarek. Two of the men then disembarked and demanded Tarek's wallet.
According to Chris, Tarek told the men to "F--k off". One of the two then pulled out a pistol and shot him in the chest, scooping up the wallet, containing the money and his various credit cards. Chris, moving to intervene, had a pistol pointed at him by the attacker, a warning that he would suffer the same if he took another step.
But the nightmare was by no means over. An ambulance which was called to take Tarek to the local Talisay District Hospital failed to turn up as the badly wounded man lay writhing on the ground in agony and bleeding profusely, his wincing movements only exacerbating the bleeding. Eventually he was bundled onto a rickshaw and pulled to hospital.
Violent crime is high and soaring in the desperately poor Philippines and foreigners are usually the victims. Cebu City is one of the most violent places. And the violence is not confined to criminals. A year after the controversial President Rodrigo Duterte launched his anti-drug campaign more than 4,000 people accused of using or selling illegal drugs have been killed and thousands of other killings are "under investigation". Most of the murders are carried out by vigilantes, or off-duty police, effectively licensed by Duterte.
According to Chris McLaughlin medical care at the hospital was rudimentary. The bullet had entered the chest, ricocheted around Tarek's ribs and lodged in his left lung,
The nursing staff would not give any medication until Tarek was seen by the surgeon, who took time to arrive. And when he did he said that he did not have a saw to open the chest and that the hospital had run out of blood for transfusions. Somehow he performed the operation and Tarek was put on a life-support machine in the Intensive Care Unit.
The British Embassy in Manila was contacted on Friday with a plea for help but so far it has been unforthcoming.
Yesterday Tarek should have been sashaying in his new kilt as a newly-married man at his wedding reception with the guests, many of whom he had met on his travels, leading the toasts and dancing with his new bride. His best man Chris had his speech prepared with the obligatory embarrassing jokes about the groom. No more.
Instead he was taken by ambulance to the rather better equipped South General Hospital outside Cebu City. He remains on life support. And this morning Chris expects to be given the bill for his pal's medical care.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here