Mansour, together with another worker, was on the night shift at the restaurant on Tuesday 3 February. Eyewitnesses told the police that at around 3am masked men on a motorcycle stopped at the fast food outlet and started shooting at it, then locked the young men in and set the restaurant ablaze, all the while sustaining the shooting. The terrified residents called the police and fire fighters who rushed to the scene, but Mansour had already become a blackened corpse and his co-worker, who managed to escape, suffered burns. The terrorists had fled the scene.
On Thursday Mansour’s family was asked by the police to collect his body from Qouesna hospital for burial. A funeral service was held Friday at the church of Mar-Girgis (St George) in Birket al-Saba. His funeral was a heartbreaking event in which the town’s Muslims and Christians took part; the townspeople carried his coffin in a procession that marched through town till the cemetery. The mourners held banners that condemned the Islamist terrorism which is evidently targeting civilians.
Mansour was the sole supporter of his family: the father who is a kidney failure patient, the mother and the 13-year-old sister Partheniya. “The Islamists burned Pola alive as they did the Jordanian pilot Muaz Kassassba,” she wailed.
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