The elderly man who was nearly stabbed in the heart by a panhandler at a Manhattan subway station spoke out from his hospital bed — warning that transit crimes like the one he was a victim of will scare off visitors to the city.
Iqbal Ahmed, a 76-year-old who immigrated from Pakistan to study in the US in 1970, is expected to remain hospitalized for several more days as he recovers from the near-fatal attack at the Herald Square subway station.
“This is not good for the city, tourists will be scared!” he told the New York Daily News on Monday from Bellevue Hospital.
The travel agent was on his way home to Brooklyn around 11:30 p.m. Sunday when he was harassed for money by David Trotman, a 38-year-old man with a lengthy rap sheet, according to police.
“When I was coming from the stairs, he said, ‘Give me money,’” Ahmed told the News.
Seconds later, the panhandler stabbed Ahmed in his left shoulder, just inches from his heart, sending him stumbling down the stairs.
“He did not give me a chance to say anything,” Ahmed recalled.
Ahmed thought he was fine until he reached the bottom of the stairs and noticed blood pouring from his shoulder, he recalled.
He stumbled to an MTA booth, where a worker called 911.
First responders brought him to Bellevue, where he underwent surgery and was listed in stable condition Tuesday.
Trotman was arrested Monday after he allegedly punched another man, 42, on a northbound A train multiple times, police said.
He faces assault charges in each of the subway attacks, and his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court was pending Tuesday.
Ahmed, who is unmarried and has no kids, frequently works late and said he usually doesn’t use the subway entrance he went to on Sunday night — but had to drop mail off in one of the USPS boxes outside that stairwell before catching the F train home.
“I didn’t even get to drop off [the mail]!” he told the News.
Doctors have told him he could spend up to four more days in the hospital before he can go home.
Ahmed was still in pain following his surgery, saying: “It’s hurting a lot now.”
A GoFundMe has been set up to pay for his hospital expenses.
His alleged attacker also faces charges for a July 12 incident in which he allegedly grabbed a 21-year-old woman’s buttocks while she was walking near Wall Street and William Street in Lower Manhattan.
Trotman was also previously arrested in April in Queens for damaging someone’s property and criminally trespassing, online records show.
His rap sheet dates back to at least 2017, when he was nabbed in Queens for grand larceny, according to cops and sources.
When Trotman was led out of the NYPD Transit Bureau on Monday, he launched into a foul-mouthed tirade, accusing white people of being “ignorant people” who “suck d–k in their sleep.”
Ahmed told the Daily News he hopes the suspect gets “whatever the law says.”
