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Who. Mark Ormrod, 40, was the first Briton to survive a triple amputation after a bomb exploded in 2007 while he was stationed as a soldier in Afghanistan. What. His prosthetic legs were stolen from the car when he left it parked in a London hotel on January 8. Why. He reported what happened on social media and a woman found the prostheses abandoned the next day in an alley.

"I was robbed yesterday in the car. They took a bag full of sweaty clothes from the gym, another one with my jiu-jitsu kimono and, what's really annoying, they also took my prosthetic legs."

Mark Ormrod (40), the first Briton to survive a triple amputation for war injuries (a bomb exploded in 2007 when he was in Afghanistan), launched his message to his 32,000 followers on X, hoping to be able to recover at least the limbs "that are 50% of my life".

"The sad thing is to think that someone is capable of stealing from a special parking lot for the disabled, taking from the car the devices that one needs to live independently and on top of that they don't care," Ormrod wrote in another message, resigned to moving around in his wheelchair with only one arm (he also lost his right arm in the explosion).

"These are special, custom-designed legs that allow me to take my kids to the beach, swim with them in the sea, go to the gym and do everything I do at home with them," said the veteran, who lives in Plymouth with his family.

His messages resonated deep on social media. On the day of the robbery, Jan. 8, hundreds of expressions of support poured in. And, among all of them, the sudden announcement of a woman who said she had found in an alley two prosthetic legs that turned out to be hers. "On my way to London tonight," Mark Ormrod told his followers. "A woman said she found my stuff abandoned in an alley near her house, and somehow made the connection with the message I had posted."

Sure enough, the prosthetics turned up not far from where they had been stolen, in the parking lot of the Premier Inn hotel in Chiswick. In just over 24 hours, Ormrod regained his smile and was able to return to Plymouth with his legs down.

His three sons call him Iron Man for his tenacity and bombproof fortitude, as he demonstrated when he won a gold medal at the 2017 Invictus Games. Prince Harry knelt at her height and praised her "ability to capture the world's imagination" with her example of self-improvement.

Mark Ormrod carried the London Olympic torch in 2012 and rode more than 4,000 kilometres in his wheelchair across the British Isles that same year. He has raised more than half a million euros for charities with his very personal challenges and was already a national hero before his latest feat.

After the happy reunion with his prosthetics, he sent a final message to the thieves: "What kind of person can steal a car in a disabled parking lot? Whoever you are, I hope your bad luck has bottomed out and things can change. Draw a line in the sand, take responsibility for your actions, and pull your life upwards to get what you want."

"I know what it's like to want to end everything," Mark recently confessed to People magazine. "I would have sold my soul to go back to being the man I was before the explosion. But if there's one thing I can do now, it's to show that there's life beyond wounds and war... Deep down, the Taliban did me a favor: my life took a path I could never have dreamed of. I wouldn't change it for anything right now."

  • United Kingdom