An American teenager wounded in the Brussels Airport attack is lucky to be alive. And he knows it.

Mason Wells: injured in Brussels and Boston.
Image: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Mason Wells, his face covered in bandages, is in a hospital in the Belgian city of Ghent where he’s spoken about surviving his second terror attack.

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Three years ago the 19-year-old from Sandy, Utah, was just a block away from the pressure-cooker bomb that exploded while he was watching his mother run the Boston Marathon.

“I don’t know if I was born under a lucky star,” he said. “I was definitely fortunate to have escaped with the injuries that I’ve escaped with at the airport, being very close to the bombs.”

Wells, who is on a two-year Mormon mission to Belgium, talked to reporters via a video link from his hospital room.

“The blast was really loud,” Wells said. “It even lifted my body a little bit. I remember feeling a lot of really hot and really cold feelings on the whole right side of my body. I was covered in a fair amount of blood, and not necessarily mine even.

“I remember seeing, you know, fire in front of my face and also kind of fire down by my feet on the ground,” he said. “We were really close. I feel lucky to escape with what I did.”

Wells was at the back of the Delta Airlines check-in line when the first bomb exploded just before 8am on Tuesday and said he was running out of the airport when the second blast hit.

“If there’s anything I’ve taken out (of this), it’s that there’s someone greater than us that’s watching over us,” he said.

Two other Mormon missionaries – Richard Norby, 66, of Lehi, Utah, and Joseph Empey, 20, of Santa Clara, Utah – also suffered serious injuries in the Brussels airport attack.