Читать книгу Agent Storm - Morten Storm - Страница 15

CHAPTER EIGHT

MI5 COMES TO LUTON

Spring–Autumn 2005

On 30 April 2005, Newsweek went to print with an incendiary story. US military personnel at Guantanamo Bay had defiled the Koran and humiliated prisoners.

The magazine reported that ‘Interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur’an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash. An army spokesman confirms that 10 Gitmo interrogators have already been disciplined for mistreating prisoners, including one woman who took off her top, rubbed her finger through a detainee’s hair and sat on the detainee’s lap.’

Newsweek retracted part of the story, but by then Muslims around the world were outraged. There were deadly riots in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan the opposition politician Imran Khan used the story to undermine the country’s military leader, General Pervez Musharraf. Jihadist communities everywhere thirsted for revenge, among them our band of brothers in Luton.

Omar Bakri helped organize a protest outside the US embassy in London on Grosvenor Square in mid-May, and I drove down from Luton in a convoy of his followers.11

A video of the event is still available online, and among the Pakistani and Arab men yelling abuse there is a tall, broad-shouldered Dane, stamping on the Stars and Stripes as it smouldered on the London pavement, smiling and chanting.

‘Bomb, bomb USA.’ ‘Remember, remember, eleventh September.’ The chants were as provocative as possible. Then we knelt to pray, before, to my astonishment, the 200 or so protesters drifted away, as if a few slogans had restored Islam’s self-respect and caused the diplomats of the Big Satan to quiver behind the bullet-proof glass of their embassy.

I was furious. Just as my adrenalin was beginning to run, the protest was over. These so-called militants were pussies. Surely we had a duty to take on the police cordon and try to enter the embassy. So we would most likely be hurt and arrested, but that would be a pin-prick compared to the injury done to our faith. I was frustrated, disappointed by Omar Bakri. He had delivered a fiery speech and then retired to his comfortable car. It was all talk. I also began to doubt whether he really had contacts in Iraq and other jihadist battlegrounds.

I returned to Luton that evening determined to expose the blowhards who proclaimed jihad but did not want to miss lunch. With the passion of a man recently redeemed from straying into the wilderness, I threw myself into research on Salafism and jihad. As an ordinary Muslim I could not pretend that I could compose a fatwa, but I planned to publish a booklet, ‘Exposing the Fake Salafis’.

Over the next few weeks, working day and night, I wrote a pamphlet that became a paper and then a treatise – more than 140 pages of closely argued rhetoric, crammed with quotations from the Koran and the ancient scholars. The fake Salafis liked to talk but were secretly in league with the kuffar who had invaded Muslim lands.

‘The Fake Salafis in our time use thousand and one excuses to deny the obligation of Jihad Fard Ayn in Iraq and other Muslim lands, also denying that those who assist the Kuffar (disbelievers) in this crusade against Islam are apostates,’ I wrote.

My conclusion was a call to arms:

‘Your duty as a true Muslim, is to support your Muslim brothers and sisters, who right now are being killed by the neo-crusaders and Jews, I ask you kindly to at least make Dua [prayers] for them, collect finance for them, and try your best to reach the frontline where your brothers are striving or at least help someone to go there.’

Intellectually at least I was already on the battlefield.

My studying was interrupted one morning in June 2005 when there was a knock on the door at our semi-detached house. (By then, we had moved to Pomfret Avenue, another nondescript street in Luton.) I looked through the bedroom window and saw a policeman. There was another knock. I whispered to Karima to tell them I was not home.

From the landing I listened.

‘What do you want?’ Karima asked.

‘It’s the police. We’d like to speak to Mr Storm.’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Yes, he’s here – we know he’s here.’

I put on my clothes and went down to the door.

The officer was soft-spoken but did not give me his name.

‘Can you come with me, Mr Storm? We have some questions we’d like to ask you.’

It seemed like this was a routine he had performed a hundred times before.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I can’t come with you but if you want you can come into my house.’

He declined, and I asked what the problem was.

‘Your car has been seen filling up at a petrol station. Thirty pounds of fuel and then whoever was driving left without paying.’

I knew it was a fabrication. Surely they could do better than this.

‘Here, take the key. Go look at the gauge. No one put thirty pounds of fuel in.’

I accompanied him outside and unlocked the car. As soon as I turned on the ignition, the police officer melted away. In his place, opening the passenger door, was a dapper young man in a suit.

‘Mr Storm – my name is Robert. I’m with British intelligence.’

His words went straight to the pit of my stomach.

‘All right,’ I said weakly, getting out of the car. ‘What do you want to speak to me about?’

‘This is dangerous,’ Robert said, ‘very, very dangerous. It’s very important that we speak.’

It was far from clear to me what was dangerous. I invited him to come inside, but insisted I had nothing to tell him.

He declined and we stood beside the car. As I began to recover my composure I was struck by how young he was. He must have just graduated. This was probably one of his first jobs in the field.

Perhaps, I thought, the security services were aware of my relapse into drugs and believed it might make me vulnerable.

‘Can I ask you a few questions?’ he resumed. Across the street I noticed glances from neighbours leaving for work.

‘Morten,’ he said, trying to be familiar and informal, ‘there’s a very dangerous situation in the UK with terrorism.’

‘First, my name is Murad,’ I replied. ‘Second, you don’t have anything to fear from Muslims. There have been IRA attacks, by Catholics, so why don’t you go to search for Catholics, or the Spanish ETA? Why are you harassing Muslims? There’s never been a terrorist attack by Muslims in the UK.’

Warming to my theme, I raised Iraq. ‘How many hundreds of thousands of children have you killed? You don’t expect Muslims to be angry? You expect to be able to hit people but for them not to retaliate? I am not scared of you. If you want I will pack a bag of clothes and you can take me to prison.’

Robert smiled and shook his head.

‘We don’t want to arrest you. We just want to ask you some things.’

Here we were – the Danish Muslim and the man from MI5 – engaged in debate on Pomfret Avenue, just around the corner from Treetop Close, in Luton.

Then the generalities ended.

‘What do you think of Abu Hamza?’ he asked.

Abu Hamza al-Masri was a militant Egyptian cleric known in the racy English tabloids as ‘Captain Hook’ because of his prosthetic hand. He claimed he had sustained the injury while on a de-mining project in Afghanistan. He had been the imam of the Finsbury Park mosque in North London.12

‘I don’t know much about him,’ I replied, which was the truth. Our paths had never crossed and I had never read his lectures. ‘And I am not going to backbite him just to please you. You are a non-believer and he is a brother Muslim.’

We talked for about two hours, standing by the car outside my house. All the time, I asked myself whether I would be charged with one of the many anti-terrorism charges already on the books. Perhaps MI5 were somehow aware of the diatribe I had drafted to justify jihad, or had identified me from the protest at the US embassy. Or perhaps I had been grassed up by the Islamic Centre in Luton, which saw me and my friends as dangerously radical.

Robert took his leave. We shook hands, both aware that I was now part of the game. What I did not know is that two officers from Danish intelligence had seen everything from a car parked nearby. MI5 and their friends clearly thought I was worth spending time with and were angling for me to share my contacts.

Just three weeks after that conversation, on 6 July 2005, the world’s leaders converged on a Scottish golf resort for the G8 summit, hosted by Tony Blair. After nearly eight years in office, Blair seemed unassailable. He had tied Britain closely to Bush by his support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where a large chunk of the UK’s armed forces were now deployed. But at home public opinion had turned decisively against the war. The rationale for the invasion had been undermined by allegations that evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction had – at the very least – been embellished.

The wars had also enraged many British Muslims. A few had travelled to Pakistan with the aim of joining al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other groups. Some had stayed and been killed – or disappeared into the tribal territories, their fate unknown. A few had come home.

On the morning of 7 July Blair and his senior ministers were presenting an ambitious agenda to the summit. An aide passed the British Prime Minister a note. Three suicide bombers had attacked the London Underground system; there were casualties and the capital was paralysed. Shortly afterwards a fourth suicide bomber blew up a London bus.

Blair emerged from the conference looking shaken.

‘It is reasonably clear that there have been a series of terrorist attacks in London,’ he said, before hurrying to a helicopter.

That morning I was oblivious to the carnage some thirty miles to the south; and I had no idea that the bombers had caught a train from Luton on their way to the capital. But my insistence to the MI5 man Robert weeks earlier – that Britain had nothing to worry about from Muslims – was suddenly null and void. And as news spread of the bombings and speculation spiked, I got hostile stares as I walked through Luton in my Muslim garb, still unaware of events in London.

A friend called me to tell me of the attacks and we all hurried to meet at the Woodland Avenue community centre. Everyone was wary of a backlash. By now we knew that some fifty people had been killed and several hundred injured.

Despite the casualties, all of them civilians, I found a way to justify the attack. Brothers in Islam had struck fear into the hearts of the kuffar and a blow at the financial heart of a state committed to war against Muslims. The attack would surely cost the British economy tens of millions, money that could not be spent on war.

My adrenalin was pumping. We had all talked about jihad; we had cheered on the brothers in Iraq. Now it was on our doorstep. Was England the next frontline in this war of religions? Anything seemed possible.

As we travelled to London the following day for a Muslim wedding, the tension was palpable. A young white man on the pavement saw us pass and raised his hand as if to take aim with a pistol. I stopped the car and called him over. He saw I was white and may have thought he had an ally in his provocation.

I spat at him and he ran to his car to grab a crowbar. I jumped out, ready for a fight, but others held me back. The last thing this wedding party needed was a brawl on a London street.

There was a spate of assaults on Muslims in Luton; Karima was harassed. Community meetings brought together Muslim sects that usually avoided each other, to discuss a common threat.

Omar Bakri Mohammed saw a dividend out of the 7/7 bombings. He summoned close followers to a meeting in Leyton in East London days later. The situation had changed, he said. The ‘Covenant of ­Security’ – that British jihadis should not consider attacking targets in Britain – was dead.

‘Now,’ he told us, ‘jihad has come to the UK. You can do whatever you wish.’

Perhaps he knew he was on safe ground. Most of his acolytes were not ready to follow the path of the 7/7 bombers. But it was not for want of permission.

Had it not been for an old Danish associate and a mislaid mobile phone, I would probably have continued listening to Omar Bakri’s bombast and training in the English countryside for the day that jihad would inevitably call.

I had met Nagieb in 2000 – he was a Danish journalism graduate of Afghan descent. He knew of my time in Yemen and wanted to make a film about the mujahideen there. And he wanted me to go with him to open doors.

I was excited by the prospect; my spirit was beginning to stir again and I still wanted to return to a truly Muslim land as Allah had ordained. I felt more in common with my friends there than with the radical blowhards in the UK. The rush that immediately followed the London bombings had worn off and I was worried that MI5 might come calling again as they stepped up their efforts to discover more about UK-based jihadist cells in the wake of the London attack.

I even began to indoctrinate my son, Osama, who was now three. We would play a game of call and response.

‘What do you want to be?’

‘I want to be mujahid.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want to kill kuffar.’

I argued to myself that if Western children could kill dark-skinned turbaned figures in computer games, I could teach my son about retribution. Hatred again.

My relationship with Karima had never really recovered. When Karima asked me back, Cindy had come looking for me in my family home in Luton, not realizing Karima would be there. It was the second time I witnessed the full force of Karima’s volcanic temper, as she shouted abuse – angered not so much by the fact that Cindy had slept with me but because she represented the decadence and permissiveness of Western women.

When I told Karima of my plans to return to Yemen, she shrugged and turned away. There was no discussion, just resignation. She felt abandoned, unwanted.

So perhaps it should not have come as a surprise when one afternoon I picked up her mobile phone as it buzzed – Karima had gone out – and read the following text: ‘Meet me in the hotel. I love you.’

It was not the fact that she had found someone else that bothered me. We had long ceased to love each other; our relationship was more a pact for the sake of the children. It was the fact that she still sheltered in the house I was paying for, still used my name to keep her European residency, and while happy to take another man in Islamic law would not divorce me in civil law.

When she returned home, she was nervous. Had I seen her phone?

I lied. It was in my pocket.

‘I want you out of the house while I look for it.’

She was not very good at keeping her nerve.

I called the number from which the suggestive text had come. A man answered. I found out later that he was a Palestinian living in Luton, whose Moroccan wife was Karima’s best friend. He and Karima had had a secret Islamic wedding.

I went back inside and confronted her.

‘I know exactly what you are up to,’ I told her quietly. ‘I know where you are going and everything. I am just asking you to give me my children.’

She looked at me with spite.

‘You will never see your children again,’ she said. ‘Never.’

She grabbed Osama and Sarah and made for the front door. I held her back and she swung round and hit me in the face. She pulled Osama by the hood of his jacket, nearly throttling him. He was crying.

‘Osama is staying with me,’ I told Karima as he cowered on the floor.

Shortly afterwards I left the house with my three-year-old son, only to find out the following day that the police were looking for me. Karima had told them that I had abducted him. I felt as if I were on the run for a crime I had never committed.

Before any sort of mediation could begin, Karima left for Morocco with Sarah – without telling me or seeing Osama.

Eventually the police tracked me down to a friend’s house in Luton. His mother had been caring for Osama while I was out. Her eyes were red and swollen when I returned.

‘They took Osama,’ she sobbed. ‘They said they were taking him to the police station.’

I summoned fellow militants and nearly a dozen of us converged on the police station. The waiting room was full of beards and robes.

I was blind with anger.

‘Where is my son?’ I demanded loudly. ‘Give me my son back.’

By then Osama was in the care of the social services department and I was redirected to an adjacent building while the rest of the unlikely delegation sat in the police waiting room.

I looked out of a featureless waiting room at a thousand shades of grey. Luton in the approaching British winter was not cheering. There was a knock and a woman brought Osama in.