The terrifying moments caught on camera where scores of crazed partygoers attack a desperate immigrant kebab owner – forcing him to fight for his life with a katana-shaped meat knife – have rallied support in Portugal, with various media praising the warrior spirit of the Kurdish people.
Images of father-of-two Mustafa Kartal were beamed into Portuguese households on April 25 after his Palácio de Kebab in Lisbon’s Cais de Sodré came under attack in the early hours of the Bank Holiday morning.
“If the man had not defended himself, the crowd would have killed him”, discotheque owner Tiago Caridade told Diário de Notícias.
It was the end of an African Party held in Caridade’s disco that led to crowds of young revellers decanting into the street near Palácio de Kebab.
Hungry perhaps, and with strength in numbers, the swarm invaded his premises, grabbing at everything.
“Give us kebabs, give us money”, Kartal says they screamed at him. “They broke bottles, they took the multibanco terminal, they tried to take the cash register. They were grabbing at everything”.
“The son of Kurdish people who have struggled their entire lives to be recognised, Mustafa defended himself at the doors of his establishment as one-by-one the rabble came to provoke him”, wrote an impassioned DN.
The video of Kartal swinging at his attackers with weapon “went viral” says the paper – while the man himself has said he just prays it has not been seen by the family he left behind in Turkey, as he has not yet been able to explain any of the horror to them.
“I have no physical training”, the exhausted entrepreneur told reporters. “All I know is work”.
But his struggle appears to have touched the heart of the nation which now sees police ‘reinforcing its presence’ around the Palácio de Kebab, disco owner Caridade vowing: “No more African Parties, and the PJ painstakingly going through video footage to try and identify all the perpetrators.
One they are particularly keen to find is the young man who fired a shot into the Palácio de Kebab which skimmed past Kartal’s head, and lodged into one of the restaurant’s walls.
The bullet has been recovered and is now being analysed to help police identify the 6.35 mm pistol it is understood to have been shot from.
Meantime, Kartal (his surname we are informed means Eagle) has been visited by immigration police SEF.
According to reports, although he has his business legalised and all his tax payments in order, he has still never managed to obtain a residency visa, and this is why he has been unable to bring over his family.
