Adventure tourism operator Brian Pickering has spoken about his escape from a gunman who wanted to shoot him.
|||Cape Town - Adventure tourism operator Brian Pickering has spoken about his escape from a gunman who wanted to shoot him in the head and kill him.
“It was pure instinct… as he squeezed the trigger, I kicked out, whipped my head sideways, and the bullet missed my face.”
This was Pickering’s extraordinary tale on Tuesday night, describing the moment on Sunday night when an attacker fired at him at point-blank range.
Incredibly, he was speaking from his home in the country - he was discharged just 24 hours after he was raced to hospital on Sunday night.
Pickering had been at his cottage at the Elgin Grabouw Country Club when he heard taps being turned on behind his home. He went outside to investigate, and faced a man with a gun aimed at him.
“I turned and ran back, and he followed me and fired.” The first shot missed, but the attacker fired again.
“But as he shot I kicked up and threw him over my head,” Pickering explained. The bullet hit his wristwatch, blasting it off his arm, as Pickering fell to the ground.
“But he was on top of me in a split second, and had the gun to my temple.”
And as the gunman fired a third time, his instincts kicked in again - possibly from his experiences with the British Army’s Royal Fusiliers in Cyprus, Malaysia and Borneo, among other war zones.
The bullet hit him in the neck, and exited, missing his throat, spinal column and other vital body parts.
“It’s an absolute miracle. If the bullet had gone centimetres to the left or right it would have gone through an artery,” Pickering said from his stoep, sipping a coffee. “He was obviously a very nervous guy, or an amateur, because if he’d had any kind of training he would have finished me off.”
For a decade, Pickering has been one of three lead motorbike riders for the Untamed African MTB Race. He rides ahead of the field to ensure the routes through the notoriously rugged terrain are clear.
He also assists with the design of the route through the Cape countryside, and owns Nature Discovery Tours.
Cape Argus