José Ramos-Horta, the president of East Timor, says he believes he has been given a second chance at life.
(CNN) — On February 11, a group of renegade soldiers invaded my home. As I walked toward my house, I was not aware that they had disarmed my guards and broken into the house, knocking down doors looking for me. But as I walked up the street — ironically, Robert F. Kennedy Boulevard, named for one of my heroes — I saw one of the renegades and knew that he was going to shoot me. As he aimed for my heart, I turned to run. Instead of the left side of my chest, he shot me twice in the right side of the back.
The shooter used "dum dum" bullets, illegal to manufacture and banned by the Geneva Convention because they expand and fragment inside the body, creating an explosion of shrapnel. One piece of shrapnel took a trajectory toward my spinal column. It stopped 2 mm short.
I was told later that between the moment that I was shot and the moment I arrived at the hospital, I lost 4 liters of blood — 80 percent of the blood in my body. I was also later told that if I had arrived at the hospital five minutes later I would have, without question, been dead.
Read more at: CNN
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