Rebel braveheart injured by shrapnel reveals how RPG killed two comrades

“Suddenly there was this huge explosion and everything went black. I was thrown to the ground and, when I looked up, the guys next to me were both dead.

“I got out of the building and started to go towards the medic to get cleaned up. I crossed the road and that’s when I got hit by a sniper. I was shot in the arm.”

Ballali, 36, from Wester Hailes, Edinburgh, was taken to hospital in Benghazi, for treatment to shrapnel wounds to his face, arms and back. He has since been moved to a clinic in Tunis where he is being closely monitored. It is hoped he will be able to travel back to the UK this week.

“My arm is really painful,” he said. “But I’m at peace. I’ve seen a lot of things that aren’t that nice, things I’d rather not have seen, but I don’t regret any of it, and it hasn’t affected me mentally. I’m a strong person.”

His father, Yunus Ballali, a long-term opponent of the Gaddafi regime who fled Libya for Scotland with his family more than 30 years ago, said: “My son is OK. He is a strong man. I’m very proud of him.”

Ballali said he was still shocked at his near-miss. “The other two guys were sitting on either side of me and they were killed instantly. I have no idea why they didn’t make it and I did.”

Last month, Ballali, who went to school in Edinburgh and worked as a club doorman, told Scotland on Sunday he had experienced a narrow miss from an RPG during fighting in the oil town of Brega, before Gaddafi’s regime fell.

“They were firing at us, and suddenly this rocket-propelled grenade came ricocheting past between me and the guy next to me and exploded right above us,” he said. “There have been quite a few times like that when I’ve though ‘OK, this is getting a bit dodgy now’. It’s squeaky bum time if you know what I mean.”

He said he had joined the rebels because he was horrified by the scenes he saw in the media following the revolution in Libya. “I had to do something,” he said. “I was sitting at home watching the revolution in Egypt on TV. Gaddafi was firing on his own people and I just found that really shocking. I decided I had to go.

“You can’t watch your own people die. You have to do something about it.”

Ballali said that he had no regrets at joining the Libyan rebels, although he did miss home comforts such as teabags and being able to watch Scotland football matches, as well as sleeping in his own bed.

He had never had any military training until he arrived in Libya in February, where he was given some rudimentary weapons instruction before being dispatched to the front line. He said at the time: “The whole army is made up of people like me.

“We’ve got doctors, students, shopkeepers, teachers – that’s who we are. Most of us are civilians.

“I would have died for this. I believe that if I had died here, then it would have been something that would have been worth dying for.”