You want a tough guy, meet Bishnu Shrestha of Nepal, a retired Gurkha soldier from the Indian army who last fall thwarted an attempted train robbery with his khukuri or kukri knife. Shrestha foiled the robbery by killing three bandits and injuring others. The remaining bandits -- all twenty-nine of them -- ran away. Shrestha was honored by the Indian government in a ceremony yesterday.
Shrestha was returning to his home town on board the train, after voluntarily retiring from the service, when approximately 40 bandits began menacing passengers with weapons and stealing jewelry, cell phones, laptops and cash. He let that go, but when they started attacking a teenage girl sitting next to him and threatening to rape her, they crossed a line and Shrestha let them know. That's when he killed the three and injured eight.
He sustained some cuts of his own from the knives the robbers carried. The robbers also had pistols but didn't use them, leading Shrestha to later remark that he supposes the guns may have been fakes. He says he doesn't know why the robbers fled, except that after twenty minutes of fighting him, they may have feared more soldiers were on the train.
Shrestha's regiment has rescinded his retirement, and he certainly sounds happy to be back with his unit. He said that his duty as a soldier is to fight the enemy, and his duty as a human being was to fight the bandits who were going to rape the young woman. “I am proud to be able to prove that a Gorkha soldier with a khukuri is really a handful," he told a newspaper.
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