A NORTH student badly beaten in a savage axe attack in India has vowed to return and complete his journey of a lifetime.
Jake Johnston, 20, was attacked and robbed in a three-hour terror ordeal at his hotel in Bathinda, northern Punjab.
Three men burst into his room in the early hours and fractured his skull in an axe attack before taking cash, a mobile phone, his bank card and a camera.
Jake escaped with his life and spent four days in hospital, but now, back home in Haltwhistle, west Northumberland, he is on the road to recovery. He had more than 200 stitches to his head wounds but at his home in Meadow View, the English Literature student declared: “I want to go back to India – this hasn’t put me off.
“I was three weeks into a six-week tour and I had a great time before the attack.
“Now hopefully I will go back out to India sometime and finish it off.
“The people who did this to me are not really representative of the people of India.
“The real people are friendly and helpful, and they were very sympathetic to me afterwards.”
Jake, who attends Queen Mary University, London, was travelling alone in India on a ticket bought for him as a gift by his parents Neil and Ivy.
An experienced traveller, Jake has been to Peru, Thailand, Asia and South America and after visiting the Taj Mahal in Agra was travelling north to Amritsar when he decided to break his journey in Bathinda after a six-hour train journey.
He booked into a hotel next to Bathinda railway station – and then the ordeal began.
“At about 1am two guys from the hotel desk that I had earlier spoken to knocked on the bedroom door and said there was a problem with the plumbing,” Jake said.
“I let them in and they were in the bathroom when three other men came in who grabbed me and attacked me.
“I didn’t really feel a lot of pain at the time as the adrenaline was flowing, but it went on for about two hours and eventually they went through my clothes and took £30 or £40 in cash, my bank card, the phone and camera.
“Then they demanded my card PIN number.
“I was considering giving them a fake one but it seemed not worth the risk, they would have come back and made it worse for me if I’d tricked them. By the next day, they’d taken out about £150 – the bank did a fraud check and found that out.”
