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Outlook: Friends with Man who Tried to Kill Me

Magazines & Reviews

Wilson Barreto and Luis Baron

30/08/2016 GMT

Friends with Man who Tried to Kill Me

BBC World Service - Outlook, Friends with Man who Tried to Kill Me

The Colombian man who became friends with the Farc commander who almost killed him

Former policeman Wilson Barreto was astonished when he found himself sharing a dormitory with the Farc commander who was in charge of the attack that blinded him

A remarkable story of two men on either side of the conflict which lasted for decades in Colombia. Luis Baron was a Farc commander who would organise bomb attacks -  one of them was a bomb house rigged to explode when the target was nearby. Policeman Wilson Barreto was badly wounded in one such explosion. In fact, he was blinded by the bomb. Years later the two men would come face to face on a leadership course, where they ended up sharing a dormitory. They have gone on to become good friends. 

For many years Seema Rao worked as a doctor in India, but at the same time she would teach commando training in the Indian Armed Forces. Specialising in close quarters battle, she teaches shooting, team tactics and hand-to-hand combat. She is the first woman to do such a thing - and she does it for nothing. She tells Jo Fidgen what drew her to martial arts when she was just a teenager..

A team of Nasa scientists has just emerged from a futuristic white dome on Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano. They have spent a year living in the dome, in near-isolation. It was an experiment to see if it might be possible for humans to live on Mars in future - the landscape on the volcano is a bit like the Red Planet. Before their mission came to an end, Outlook asked the crew members to look back on a year spent on their fictional Mars base. We hear the messages they beamed back, recorded inside their volcano habitat. 

The voice of Russian soprano, Albina Shagimuratova, has been described as 'technically flawless, luscious-toned and thrilling'. But she very nearly did not make it as an opera singer. Albina did not grow up in Russia, but in Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, when it was part of the Soviet Union. She tells us her remarkable story. 

(Photo: Wilson Barreto and Luis Baron. Photo: Natalio Cosoy)

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