Remembering the martyrs at Jibla Baptist Hospital

Martyr Martha Myers - IMB Photo - Source: Baptist Press

By Michael Logan - Posted at Baptist Press:

JIBLA, Yemen (BP) -- It's been 15 years since I walked the dry, stony grounds of Jibla Baptist Hospital in Yemen, where a lone gunman murdered three International Mission Board medical missionaries on a December morning in 2002.

Southern Baptists had invested their lives in this medical center for more than 35 years as they cared for thousands of people in this struggling Middle Eastern nation.

I arrived shortly after the Dec. 30 attack to cover the tragedy. Just days after the killing, I stood in hospital director Bill Koehn's office, where Abed Abdul Razak Kamel, an Islamic militant, had appeared at the doorway and gunned down Bill, physician Martha Myers, and purchasing agent Kathy Gariety that terrifying morning.

I remember feeling as though a weight had fallen on my chest as a hospital worker showed me how the killer left Bill's office and briskly walked through the hospital's courtyard to the pharmacy office where he shot Don Caswell two times, severely wounding him. The worker guided me back out to the courtyard where the gunman, then out of bullets, was confronted by armed hospital guards. He calmly placed his pistol on the ground, raised his hands, and was arrested.

Continue reading here.