Mujtaba was at home on Monday when he heard there had been a blast outside of his brother’s school. The 30-year-old ran to the site of the bombing and asked what happened. “No one was willing to tell me,” he recalls after some coaxing. “Even my friends from the village turned away from me. Finally one of them told me, ‘Your brother has been martyred.’ That’s all I was told.”
Immediately he began to weep — the two had been close, spending hours together every day. “At that time, I was so sad. So, so sad,” he says. “Finally, one friend told me what Aitzaz had done. I had no idea. Then I was happy, but still, I couldn’t stop crying.”
Read the rest of my article for The Friday Times about Aitzaz Hasan, a 15-year-old boy who gave his own life to stop a suicide bomber he saw outside of his school.