As soon as the attack on the minister was made, information of it was sent off to the Resident, Colonel Richmond, who wrote to request the Brigadier Commanding the Troops in Oude, to send him, as soon as possible, a regiment of infantry with two guns, from the Cantonments, which are three miles and a-half distant from the Residency, on the opposite side from the scene of the attack, to prevent any tumult that the loose characters of the city might attempt to raise on the occasion, and repaired himself to the spot attended by the Assistant, Captain Bird, and a small guard of sipahees. They reached the open spot, in the centre of which the minister lay, about a quarter of an hour after he fell. He found the street, in which the attack took place, crowded with people up to the place where the two sentries, Fuzl Allee and Hyder Khan, stood at each end of the open space, in the centre of which the minister lay, with the daggers of the two other assassins pressing upon his breast. On reaching one end of the open space, the Resident directed Captain Bird to advance to the spot where the minister lay. The assassin who guarded that end at first threatened to shoot him, but no sooner recognized him than he let him pass on unattended. He asked the two men, who knelt over the minister, what they meant by this assault. They told him, that good men were no longer employed in the King’s service, and that they were, in consequence, without the means of subsistence; and had been compelled to resort to this mode of obtaining them; that they required fifty thousand rupees from the minister, with a written assurance from the British Resident, that they should be escorted in safety across the Ganges into the British territory with this sum.
The Resident peremptorily refused to enter into any written agreement with them, and told them, through the Assistant, that if they presumed to put the minister to death, or to offer him any further violence, they should be all four immediately shot down and cut to pieces; but, if they did him no further harm, their lives should, be spared; and, to prevent their being killed as soon as they quitted their hold, that he would take them all with him to the Residency, and neither imprison them himself, nor have them made over as prisoners to the Oude Government; but that he declined being a party to any arrangement that the minister might wish to make of paying money for his life.