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CHAPTER SEVEN

FAMILY FEUDS

Summer 2002–Spring 2005

Even if my first-born was called Osama, his grandmother had a right to meet him. It was also a good moment to leave Yemen for a while. The security services, no doubt encouraged by the Americans, seemed much more intent on monitoring foreign ‘activists’.

On a balmy late-summer’s day in 2002, a neat suburban house near my home-town of Korsør was decked out incongruously in Moroccan and Danish flags. It was the welcome that my family had prepared for an unlikely couple: the Danish jihadi and his Moroccan bride. Aunts, uncles and new great-grandparents – all were there to greet the first of a new generation, a three-month-old boy with a shock of black hair named Osama.

My stepfather brooded in the background; he had not forgotten that I had put him in hospital. My mother tried to conceal her anger at the choice of Osama as her grandson’s name, just as I tried to suppress my disdain for her as a non-Muslim. I tried (as was my duty) but inevitably failed to persuade her to convert to Islam, and she could never bring herself to call me Murad. But she found some solace in my faith – at least I was now not going to become a criminal. She may not have felt so confident had she known some of the people I counted as friends in Sana’a and Taiz. She had no idea how radical I had become. I think it was partly because she was in denial. She simply didn’t want to know.

The atmosphere in Denmark after 9/11 hardened towards Muslims. Karima wore a niqab in the streets, so only her eyes could be seen. She wore gloves even on a summer’s day. I wore a traditional, long, flowing thawb. Between us we drew plenty of suspicious glances.

After a couple of months my mother’s welcome began to wear out and I found the primness of our surroundings too much to bear. In the wake of the attack on the MV Limburg, I had been advised by contacts in Taiz not to return to Yemen yet; the ‘brothers’ were being rounded up in dozens. If I had to stay in Denmark I would rather it be among ‘my own’ – among the grey apartment buildings of the Odense suburb of Vollsmose, where Muslims outnumbered native Danes. Many were Somali, Bosnian and Palestinian immigrants. Stories were beginning to appear in the Danish media about the crime rate in Vollsmose, ­stories that were meat and drink to the far-right parties.

We moved into a bare three-bedroom apartment. While Karima felt more comfortable to hear Arabic on the streets and see other veiled women, she did not appreciate our modest surroundings, nor my preference for debating jihad rather than clocking on for some menial job. Vollsmose had plenty of gang-related trouble and occasionally we would be woken by the sound of gunfire.

I soon reconnected with old associates such as Mohammad Zaher, my fishing partner from a couple of years previously. I noticed Zaher had become more militant and now had a recent convert to Islam trailing around as his sidekick.

Abdallah Andersen, who worked as a teaching assistant, was clean-shaven with a mop of dark hair and a fleshy round face. He was insecure and timid, easily led, and looked up to Zaher.

Nothing suggested they would soon plan to bring terror to the streets of Denmark.

In September 2006 Zaher, Andersen and several others would be arrested in Vollsmose after a sting operation by the Danish intelligence agency, PET, involving an informant. Angered by the publication of controversial cartoons in Denmark that lampooned the Prophet, the group had discussed attacking the Danish parliament, Copenhagen town hall square and the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Police found fifty grams of detonating explosive in a glass flask in Zaher’s bathroom. He was convicted and sentenced to eleven years. Andersen received a four-year sentence.

I found that I was something of a celebrity among the more radical in Vollsmose thanks to an interview I had done with a Danish newspaper in which I refused to condemn the 9/11 attacks so long as people in the West declined to condemn the sanctions that had caused the premature deaths of so many Iraqi children. It was a glib comparison, but one that made me plenty of friends in the more radical mosques.9

I had no work but was still receiving an allowance from the Danish government for studying in Yemen, even though I was now in my mid-twenties, living in Denmark and not even attending college courses. The income allowed me to spend my days in prayer. I posted on Islamist chat forums and watched the growing archive of jihadist videos. I began to adopt a takfiri viewpoint, seeing some other Muslims as ­kuffar – no better than disbelievers because of their views. One of them was Naser Khader, a Syrian-born immigrant and Denmark’s first Muslim MP, who took to the airwaves to argue that Islam and democracy were compatible. Then he began criticizing Sharia law. Seething with anger I wrote on an online Islamic forum: ‘He is a murtad [apostate]. You don’t need a fatwa to kill him.’

My commitment to the cause went beyond words. I joined other would-be jihadis, including Zaher and my Pakistani friend Shiraz Tariq, for training at paintball sites. To us it was not a game; we declined protective gear so that when we were hit by a pellet it hurt. One drill involved a team member charging out in a suicide-style attack to draw fire from the other team. Although I did not know it at the time, my activities, especially online, were being monitored by Danish intelligence. My situation was faintly ridiculous – funded by one Danish ministry, housed by another, watched by a third.

Everywhere I went, militant groups were growing and coalescing – and the intelligence services were struggling to identify those who would cross the line from talk to terrorism.

Karima did not like Odense, nor Denmark, and by early 2003 was pregnant with our second child. I hoped that she might settle better in Britain. For the second time I set off for England to find work and a place to live so that the woman in my life could follow me. And for the second time, the woman had other ideas. When I called home, day after day, there was no answer. I called hospitals, the police, my family; no one had seen Karima. Eventually I found out by calling her brother in Rabat that she had returned to Morocco with Osama.

Our relationship had been struggling. She was still pious but she also seemed to hanker after a life of comfort in Europe. A rundown apartment did not match her expectations, and she had begun berating me for not providing sufficiently. I began to think that her humility and deference years earlier in Rabat had been a well-acted play.

Angry and frustrated, I flew to Morocco. It took a month and a good deal of money to be allowed to see Osama, and Karima also insisted on a private hospital to give birth. With help from friends, I scraped the money together. Our daughter, Sarah, was born in early August.

It was a time of upheaval. The US invasion of Iraq – its ‘shock and awe’ resembling some Hollywood script – had begun in March. I watched videos of US soldiers crossing into Iraq carrying bibles as if to bait Muslims. Neither I nor anyone I knew had any sympathy for a tyrant such as Saddam Hussein, whom we regarded as an atheist. But none of us believed the claims made by President Bush that Saddam’s regime had worked with al-Qaeda or was hiding weapons of mass destruction. We saw the invasion as another declaration of war against Muslims and another reason to embrace jihad.

The humiliation of another Muslim country seemed complete. It had taken days for US tanks to advance on Baghdad. The Iraqi army had crumbled; its leadership surrendered or fled. The Stars and Stripes fluttered across the country. There was an arrogance to the Americans’ war aims. They would make Iraq a beacon of democracy and the rest of the Arab world would follow gratefully. Islam could take a running jump.

For now I had more immediate and personal issues to deal with. If I wanted to repair my marriage, I needed to find work and improve our standard of living. In Denmark my criminal record stalked me, preventing me from getting a job. In England I had a better chance of finding work and someone to stay with – the former prison inmate Suleiman with whom I had arrived on the ferry six years earlier. Karima and I made a pact: if I could find a job in England she would bring the children over.

Suleiman had moved from Milton Keynes to a small ground floor flat in Luton, just north of London. On my return there from Morocco I got work driving a forklift truck in a warehouse in nearby Hemel Hempstead. It was hardly the goal of an aspiring jihadi. But if I wanted to see my children again, it would have to do.

If Vollsmose had been simmering with militancy, Luton was ready to boil over. It had a high concentration of Kashmiri immigrants from Pakistan, and unemployment and discrimination were pervasive. Many of their children had grown disaffected with mainstream British society and rejected their parents’ efforts at assimilation. They had turned to radical Islam and the war in Iraq had added fuel to the fire.

I saved enough cash to begin renting a nondescript terraced house; by the end of 2003 my rare bout of self-discipline had paid off. Karima, Osama and Sarah arrived and settled into an anonymous existence on Connaught Road among the backstreets of Luton. It was a tightly packed street of post-war homes crammed with cars and vans. None had any sort of front garden; just a few paving slabs decorated with dustbins. Karima, to start with, was happier. Dressed in the full veil she was like hundreds of women in Luton. But, for that very reason, the town was also beginning to attract far-right parties, and racial assaults were not uncommon.

In Luton I quickly fell in with like-minded brothers. We would hang out, eat chicken and chips and talk jihad. I developed a following because I had met some of the best-known radical figures in the Arab world. The Islamist insurgency in Iraq had emboldened us and provided a platform for a radical preacher called Omar Bakri ­Mohammed – a man who could whip up a crowd.

I first heard him speak in the spring of 2004 at a small community centre on Woodland Avenue, where some of the most militant Muslims in Luton congregated.

It was packed for the occasion – rows of young bearded men wearing Taliban-style salwar kameez. Women shrouded completely in black stood in a segregated section at the back of the hall.

A hush went around the room when the cleric, a large and portly figure, climbed up on stage, supporting his girth with a walking stick. He had oversized spectacles and a thick beard.

‘Brothers, I carry important news. The mujahideen in Iraq are fighting back and they are winning. They are striking fear into the Americans,’ he roared in an accent that was a cross between his native Syria and East London.

The resistance of one city had given jihadis cause for hope. Fallujah, fifty miles west of Baghdad, was a Sunni stronghold whose people had never welcomed the Americans. Within days of their arriving and commandeering a school there were protests which turned violent. US forces opened fire on rioters, killing several. The Americans had just launched an offensive in the city after the charred bodies of four US. security contractors were strung up on a bridge by insurgents. But the Americans had run into stiff resistance, and around the world jihadis were looking to Fallujah as the defining battle to save Iraq from the apostates. Emboldened by the failure of the Americans to capture the city, the jihadists had declared an Islamic emirate, and started implementing Sharia law.

‘Subhan’Allah, Allahu Akbar [Glory be to God, God is Great]!’ Bakri Mohammed bellowed. ‘I just received greetings from brothers in Iraq from Fallujah saying the fight is going well. They ask us to keep on working for our Deen. Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself gives us his greetings,’ he thundered.

Zarqawi, a Jordanian building a new al-Qaeda franchise, was winning growing fame in extremist circles as the standard bearer for resistance against the American occupation.

The audience lapped up Omar Bakri’s remarks. He was not a man wracked by self-doubt. While his Arabic rendition of the Koran left something to be desired, he had charisma and answers to the questions of the day and remarkable contacts. What particularly appealed to me was the way he marshalled the Koran, Hadith and centuries-old Islamic law to justify bin Laden’s war.

Omar Bakri led the group al-Muhajiroun, a radical UK outfit that was the cheerleader for al-Qaeda, and walked a thin line between freedom of speech and incitement to terrorism. He had called the 9/11 hijackers the ‘magnificent nineteen’ and his online sermons – followed by hundreds of young militants – justified jihad against those he called the ‘crusaders’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the next few lectures I attended his message was inflammatory. Omar Bakri said the United States was massacring Muslims and it was the duty of all Muslims to fight back. He was fond of quoting one verse from the Koran:

‘The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Prophet and strive to make mischief in the land is only this: that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides, or they should be imprisoned.’

His acolytes would sometimes set up a projector, flashing images of Iraqis allegedly killed by the Americans. There were also photos of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, which had just been made public. Such humiliation of Muslims made me seethe with anger.

Omar Bakri also told us that in this war there was no distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. The only real distinction was between Muslims and disbelievers and the life of a disbeliever was worthless. Bakri had formed al-Muhajiroun in ­Britain in 1996 and had steadily become more radical, especially after 9/11. Though he was dismissed by many as a loudmouth, his followers, many of whom only had a superficial knowledge of Islam, hung on his every word and sometimes gravitated towards violence. Several of his acolytes had become involved in terrorist plots – including one sponsored by al-Qaeda to set off large fertilizer-based bombs in crowded spaces, such as the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London. He had a remarkable record of mentoring and teaching young militants who subsequently plotted violence – but of never being involved in, nor aware of, their plans.

After two British men carried out a suicide attack against a bar in Tel Aviv, he boasted that one of them had taken a course he had run on Islamic law, but insisted he was unaware of their plot. He also spoke of a ‘Covenant of Security’ – which held that Muslims living in Britain should not commit acts of jihad there, but could wage jihad overseas. He told a story about the companions of the Prophet Mohammed who were given protection and hospitality in Christian-ruled Abyssinia. This had brought about the concept in the Koran of a covenant, whereby Muslims are not allowed to attack the inhabitants of a country where they find refuge. It was a cunning way to avoid getting into trouble with the UK’s tough terrorism legislation.

At Omar Bakri’s lectures a quiet British-Pakistani called Abdul Waheed Majeed sat at the back, taking the official minutes of the proceedings. He lived in Crawley, a sleepy market town south of London, but drove up for the talks. He had been one of a group of young men mentored by Omar Bakri in Crawley, several of whom had planned to blow up the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London. Majeed was not implicated in the plot but years later would himself make the ultimate sacrifice for al-Qaeda.

Soon I was attending Omar Bakri’s ‘VIP’ lectures, which were open to only a few of his closest followers like Abdul Majeed. Omar Bakri was impressed by the fact I had spent time in Yemen and by the name I had given my son. He liked to call me Abu Osama (the father of Osama).

These sessions were held at least once a week in followers’ houses in Luton with six to ten of us. They were followed by a large dinner of lamb or chicken offered by the host. Omar Bakri liked his food.

Behind closed doors his message was very different. On one occasion he said he was issuing a fatwa that allowed for the killing of the disbelievers – the kuffar – in England because in his view they were part of a larger conflict. Asked by one of the group – a red-bearded optician of Pakistani origin from Birmingham – whether it was permissible to stab kuffar on the street, he confirmed that it was.

Omar Bakri had come to the UK to escape prosecution in Saudi Arabia, but was quietly giving his blessing to followers to kill people on the streets of the country he now called home.

I was among a small group of his followers who tore down advertising posters showing scantily clad women and maintained a stall in Luton town centre to distribute leaflets and proselytize with megaphones. For me, it was belonging to another gang. But the fractious atmosphere – including a growing number of assaults on Muslim women – gave us a real sense of purpose in defending our community. It was not Fallujah, but it was a much smaller part of the same struggle.

We would beat up drunkards who were harassing veiled women. On one occasion a fellow al-Muhajiroun member and I chased two men through the Arndale Shopping Centre after they had abused Muslim women. I caught up with one in a Boots chemist’s store and dragged him to the ground among the shelves of cosmetics, punching him repeatedly before escaping as the police arrived. When Luton Town football club played home matches, which attracted groups of neo-Nazi skinheads, I would carry a baseball bat or hammer with me. And my little circle rejected attempts by other Muslims to engage politically in England, regarding such efforts as useless and against Islam.

I felt Islamophobia at first hand, especially when subjected to ‘additional screening’ at airports on a regular basis. On one trip from Denmark, I was held up for two hours at customs at Luton airport while they checked through my luggage and asked me the usual questions.

‘Are you doing this because you hate Muslims? That’s the reason, isn’t it?’ I asked accusingly. They looked offended. One went to fetch a colleague, a British-Pakistani woman wearing a hijab.

‘I’m a Muslim too and I can assure you this is nothing to do with our religion,’ she said.

‘You’re not a Muslim. You’re just pretending to be one. What you actually are is a hypocrite,’ I snapped.

Jihadi-Salafism was not exactly an inclusive creed.

Omar Bakri designated me the ‘Emir of training’ for the group because of my boxing background. I instructed a small group of al-Muhajiroun in boxing in the gym. And I began leading expeditions of young British extremists to Barton Hills, a nature reserve north of Luton, where we conducted paramilitary exercises without weapons.

I made the drills up as I went along, using al-Qaeda training videos I had seen online as inspiration. Getting my trainees to crawl through an icy stream and then run up a steep bank was a staple. I loved being ­outdoors and so did my students. They got to play at being mujahideen for the day; shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ resounded through the forested hills.

Soon there was so much demand for the training that I was leading groups of a dozen into the hills twice a week. They came from as far away as Birmingham to join in.

Among those I encountered in Luton was Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, a young man of Iraqi descent who had spent much of his childhood in Sweden. We bumped into each other in the men’s clothing department at a large store where he worked. Al-Abdaly had deep-brown eyes and luxuriant black hair; he could have been a matinee idol. But he was in Luton, a place that did not scream opportunity. We played football and went to the gym together, and met at Friday prayers.

Occasionally Taimour came along to al-Muhajiroun’s open meetings, more out of curiosity than conviction. He was a quiet character who rarely expressed any views. From time to time we did get into theological debates, and he would gently challenge me on my uncompromising embrace of the takfiri position. Like my Danish friends in Vollsmose, he seemed an unlikely candidate for terrorism. His wife did not wear the full veil, or niqab, but a modern loose hijab. Years later Taimour would be another to confound my expectations.

For extremists like me, the imprisonment without trial of alleged al-Qaeda members at Guantanamo Bay and the scandal at Abu Ghraib infuriated us. My Luton fraternity would mockingly describe the US President as Sheikh Bush because the Saudi religious establishment was so deferential to the Americans, condemning terrorist attacks in Iraq but never mentioning the deaths of ordinary Iraqis at the hands of US forces.

On 7 May 2004 the American civilian Nick Berg was executed in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian jihadi for whom no level of violence or brutality seemed excessive. Zarqawi ensured that Berg’s beheading was filmed.

At that time Zarqawi was something of a hero to us; he was on the frontline and not cowed by vastly superior forces. He was ready to use the sword himself and was developing even more of a following than Osama bin Laden among my Luton circle.

The video of Berg’s killing, and others of attacks on US forces in Iraq, became popular among jihadis in Luton and elsewhere in the UK, turning up on DVDs distributed by al-Muhajiroun.

I too watched the video of Berg’s murder, but had no idea until later that the man to his right, restraining him as Zarqawi prepared for the fatal blow, was Mustapha Darwich Ramadan, whom I had spoken with in a Danish prison in 1997. After his release Ramadan had got into more trouble and fled to Lebanon and then Iraq, where he had adopted a nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed Lubnani, and joined the militant Islamist group Ansar al-Islam.

Lubnani and his sixteen-year-old son were killed in Fallujah, fighting with al-Qaeda against US forces.

I was not alienated by the brutality of the videos emerging from Iraq because they represented justifiable retribution for the invasion of Muslim lands. They would instil terror in the enemy. Allah had told Mohammed that in war slaughter was preferable to taking many captives. In the words of the Koran: ‘It is not for any prophet to have captives until he has made slaughter in the land. You desire the lure of this world and Allah desires (for you) the Hereafter, and Allah is Mighty, Wise.’

I could separate these remote acts of war from my everyday surroundings in a way that many of Omar Bakri’s followers could not. To young men like the optician who attended his private lectures, the enemy was everywhere, in uniform and out of uniform, in Baghdad and Birmingham. They had bought into a very simple distinction: it was the disciples of Allah against the disbelievers.

I found it difficult to accept that simplistic formula. Perhaps my basic humanity held me back from seeing the world as a struggle between good and evil, where the evil included ordinary people trying to raise families and hold down jobs. Despite the fatwas that justified the 9/11 attacks, I had begun to feel nagging doubts about the targeting of civilians. Jihad to me was still a defensive action to protect the faith. And on a personal level, I simply liked to be liked – by Muslims and non-Muslims. Whether it was a brief chat with a supermarket cashier or a bus driver, a conversation about football at the warehouse or helping someone struggling with their shopping, I saw non-Muslims I knew as fellow human beings, albeit misguided ones.

I became adept at distinguishing between my commitment to the cause – and to al-Muhajiroun – and the rapport I developed with ordinary people I encountered.

I was proving less adept at keeping my marriage alive. I had given up my job as a forklift driver and was working as an occasional nightclub bouncer. I certainly had the build to qualify, and made more money than when I had a regular job. Being paid in cash at the clubs and pubs of Luton and nearby towns had one additional benefit: tax on my income would not directly go into the British government’s coffers for its war against Muslims overseas.

But Karima was unhappy, prone to mood swings, intolerant of my lifestyle as the ‘Muslim bouncer’. She felt alone and struggled to cope with the children. Osama had become a boisterous toddler. At one point – during a row about my lengthy absences from Connaught Road – she spat in my face.

On a grim evening of drizzle in the autumn of 2004 she came to me with a simple request.

‘Can you leave?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want you here any more.’

Karima asked me for a ‘divorce in Islam’ and even wanted me to help find her a new husband. Rather than allow a man I did not know to move into the house where my young children lived, I went as far as introducing her to a Turkish friend of mine. He became her new ­husband – at least in Islam if not according to the law of the land – and moved in with Karima. But three days later he moved out again.

‘I couldn’t take her,’ he sighed. We laughed.

With nowhere to live and a sense of failure, I hit a low that recalled my trip to jail in Denmark. Then my response had been very different: no more crime, find discipline and self-respect through becoming a good Muslim. As 2005 began, turmoil produced the opposite effect: it was like a relapse to my Bandido days. There was nothing in the Koran to guide the conduct of a nightclub bouncer. When I found club-goers with cocaine, I gave them the option of handing it to me or handing it to the police. Soon I had a lot of cocaine and began using it again after seven years of self-denial. I also had a wild partner, a blonde called Cindy10 who worked for a car dealership and filled the rest of her waking hours with hardcore partying.

Within about three minutes of meeting her and a friend outside one of the clubs where I was working, Cindy had leered at me.

‘I love spanking,’ she said.

‘What do you want me to spank you with?’ I shot back.

She named a certain whip apparently well known in S&M circles and gave me her phone number.

Whether I was still technically married to Karima or not, the Koran promised severe punishment for sex outside marriage.

‘The woman and the man who fornicate scourge each of them a hundred whips; and in the matter of God’s religion, let no tenderness for them seize you if you believe in God and the Last Day.’

It was the sort of punishment that Cindy might appreciate. But I spent the next few months living a life of contradictions, giving in to every sort of temptation but then trying to repent through prayer. I was hopelessly adrift, in a maelstrom of sex, drugs and brawls, interrupted by occasional reconnections to the faith.

One of the clubs where I worked was in the town of Leighton Buzzard. Shades was a pitiful place: a scar on what had once been a pretty street in a country town. It saw plenty of fights and I earned my keep. Tony, the head doorman, was an affable guy in his early forties and smarter than your average bouncer. He could be thoughtful and inquisitive, unlike the louts that we threw out of Shades most nights. I was the first Muslim convert he had worked with and he was curious about why I had chosen Islam.

On a bitterly cold evening in February 2005 Tony picked me up at Leighton Buzzard station in his ageing Honda Accord. Normally we would talk about boxing, work or the weather. But on that evening, as we sat at traffic lights, he turned to me and asked simply:

‘Why does Allah want people to kill other people? Don’t you think, Murad, Allah would prefer you to teach people to read?’

I stumbled, before offering up stock answers about the need for jihad to protect my religion in the face of Western oppression. But the nakedness of Tony’s question troubled me. Since becoming a Muslim seven years before, I had learned to cultivate or imagine enemies – Shi’ites, the Muslim Brotherhood, racists in Luton, more recently the US government. Somehow I had become identified by whom or what I loathed; enemies provided an outlet for my anger. But they also camouflaged the real reasons for embracing hatred. Anger and frustration had been part of me since childhood; how much easier it was to hate than to reconcile.

My reflex reaction when confronted with painful questions was to blame the Devil for trying to undermine my faith. Since becoming a Muslim I had been constantly reminded by imams and scholars that Satan was always looking to sow doubt. As it was written in the Koran: ‘Satan said: “O my Lord! Because You misled me, I shall indeed adorn the path of error for mankind on earth, and I shall mislead them all. Except Your chosen slaves among them.” ’

Amid the hedonism of life with Cindy, I felt weak – as if slipping back towards my clubbing days in Korsør. I had to escape before the quicksand enveloped me. And it was my estranged wife who would – at least for a while – rescue me.

‘Would you come back?’ was Karima’s simple question when I picked up the phone. It was the early spring of 2005. She sounded exhausted rather than desperate for my company. Even so I was elated at the chance to be reunited with my children. I would miss the sex with Cindy but not the unhinged lifestyle – nor the lack of any purpose.

Repentance is a formidable force, and helped me to put the wild interlude behind me. Walking through the backstreets of Luton, I would recite to myself the words of Allah.

‘Those are the true believers who, when they commit an evil deed, or wrong their souls, remember Allah, and seek forgiveness for their sins – and who but Allah forgives sins?’

9 Among my circle was a Moroccan called Said Mansour who had married a Danish woman. He often came to my home and spent much of his time producing CDs and DVDs of sermons and speeches by al-Qaeda figures. He was also alleged to have been in contact with Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted of conspiracy in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. After three police raids on his home, Mansour would eventually become the first person in Denmark to be prosecuted and convicted under new legislation that criminalized incitement to terrorism. But by 2009 he was freed and disappeared underground. After spending time in jail he was arrested again for ‘incitement’ in February 2014.

10 Cindy is not her real name. I have used a pseudonym.