05 January,2010 01:04 PM IST | | IANS
"Please help me, I'm dying," pleaded Nitin Garg, who was viciously stabbed in this Australian city, before he turned blue and passed out. He died in hospital, said his shocked housemate.
Garg, 21, lurched into Hungry Jack's on Saturday after his torso was sliced open by a massive knife wound. As he pleaded with co-workers at the fast-food outlet to help him, his lips turned blue.
On learning about the incident, his housemates, Sandeep and Parminder Singh, rushed to the Royal Melbourne Hospital but they did not see him alive.
Sandeep said the eight Indians living together in a house in Newport were like family and Garg was like a brother to him.
He had to make the heartbreaking call to Garg's brother in India to tell him of the stabbing. "He just would not believe me when I told (him) Nitin was no more and asked to speak to the doctor," The Age quoted him as saying on Tuesday.
Singh said: "He fell into the arms of one of his colleagues and said "Please help me, I'm dying", then he went blue and passed out."
Sandeep added: "We were like family, we took care of each other."
The housemates can scarcely believe that his chest had been cut open in the attack.
"The doctor said it was a long wound from abdomen to the heart," Singh was quoted as saying.
Sandeep added: "Whoever did this knows how to kill."
They said two students staying with them in Newport had spoken to their families and they wanted them to return to India. More are likely to follow.
"Nitin Garg spent $40,000 studying and what did he get for it? He got knifed," said Sandeep.
The Australian government says it will try to return Garg's body to his family as expeditiously as possible.
Acting Foreign Minister Simon Crean said he did not believe the attack was racially motivated.
"No one who knows this country believes we are a racist country," he told Radio 3AW. "Do we have crime in Australia? Yes. But there is crime all around the world."
