Bangladesh cricket team's manager and former captain Khaled Mashud said they were very lucky not to have been inside the mosque when the shooting took place in Christchurch on Friday morning.
Most of the Bangladesh players were on the team bus, close to the Masjid Al Noor where they were supposed to pray their Jumma prayers when the incident took place.
Talking to the reporters after their safe return to the team hotel, Mashud said, "We can count ourselves extremely lucky. There were 16/17 of us in the bus. Only two of the players were in the team hotel," Mashud said.
"We were, at best, 50 metres away from the mosque. Had we reached there three or four minutes earlier and been inside the mosque, it would have been a massive accident for us. We watched in horror, like you see in movies, people coming out of the mosque with blood dripping from their bodies. We were inside the bus for eight to ten minutes there, and we had our heads bowed down to avoid any stray fire. The players were absolutely distraught watching this incident unfold," Mashud described what he and the other players saw of the incident.
The Bangladesh team manager said they were trying to arrange everything to get back to Bangladesh as soon as possible. "Things like flight schedule and ticketing are involved. 19 of us will go back to Dhaka while some of the support staff will leave for other destinations. So we're trying to get the tickets for the players so that we can get back home as soon as possible."
