Pakistani school massacre survivor gets UK care

A Pakistani boy who was seriously wounded during a school massacre is to undergo surgery in Birmingham.

Ahmad Nawaz, 15, was shot in the arm during an attack at the Army Public school in Pakistan in December.

He is to receive exploratory surgery at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on Saturday, having spent the past eight weeks in another hospital.

Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai was treated at the same hospital after being shot by the Taliban in 2012.

Scores of people, many of them children, were killed in the attack on the army-run school in Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan last year.

Taliban gunmen scaled the walls of the school's compound before going on a shooting spree, killing 141 children and staff, in one of the worst assaults in the country's recent history.

The BBC's Phil Mackie says that Ahmad's parents lost one son, Haris, in the attack and feared that Ahmad would lose the use of his left arm.

This was because doctors at the hospital in which he has been treated did not have the necessary expertise or equipment to repair the damage caused by the gunshot wound.

Malala Yousafzai was also treated at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital

The Pakistani government has agreed to pay for Ahmad's medical treatment in Birmingham after a high-profile campaign in Pakistan. The teenager was flown into UK on Friday.

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital is home to some of the world's leading experts in treating battlefield wounds.

Malala Yousafzai wrote an anonymous diary about life under Taliban rule in north-west Pakistan, and was later shot in the head by militants.

In 2013 she became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize.