Khaled was a successful student. Though not clever enough to enter the elite arm of the air force, he still qualified for officer training with the artillery. Ironically, one indeed of many ironies, had he been an air force pilot he would not have been in a position to take Sadat’s life.
For a year, ever since the big crackdown by Sadat on everyone who had opposed him in word and deed, but especially word, there had been open talk – if such a thing is possible – among clandestine groups that the President should be assassinated. Killing a ruler is prohibited by most interpretations of the sayings of the Prophet, but the new younger firebrands of the Islamic jihadist movements took their inspiration from the hypocritical Mongol Muslim rulers of the twelfth century who would drink alcohol and eat pork while professing to be followers of Islam. Baiburs had defeated such Mongols, so it was seen as legitimate to take arms against a leader who was not a ‘real’ Muslim. A book written and privately printed by an imam called Farag Atiya extolled this viewpoint.
That Khaled would ever read such a book or even meet its author was again an unlikely coincidence. Khaled wanted to get married (history would have been very different if he had done so) and in order to do so needed a flat of his own. While wandering around the neighbourhood of Boulaq he noticed someone addressing the faithful with vigour and enthusiasm at a nearby mosque. This was in 1980, a year before the assassination. Khaled approached the preacher, Farag Atiya, hoping that the man might help him find a flat. Farag realised that this young army officer was just what he needed. He befriended him and gave him a copy of his book, The Absent Prayer. Khaled was one of the very few actually to get a chance to read this book, because when it came to the notice of Colonel Zumr, the originator of Islamic Jihad in Egypt (and the world), the precursor of Al-Qaeda, Zumr declared (in the days before the internet and the anonymity which that provides) that the book was inflammatory and would serve only to arouse suspicions and get people arrested. So 450 or more of the original 500 copies were burned.
It wasn’t the sole reason for Khaled’s conversion, but, rather like that select few who read the first Harry Potter novel when it came out in a tiny print-run and then felt superior, Khaled, having read one of the rare fifty originals, felt honoured. He now knew he wanted to serve the cause.
On 23 September his chance came, though again he sought to avoid the final act. He was summoned by his commanding officer and told to lead the 333 Artillery Battalion’s eleven gun carriages during the 6 October Parade. Khaled asked to be excused. He had already told his family that he would be returning to Mallawi for 8 October, which was the religious ceremony of Eid el-Adha. His commanding officer was adamant – he would have to lead the gun section of the parade. This would place him at the front of eleven lorries towing 131mm guns. At that moment Khaled knew his hand had been forced by fate. Given his commitment to ridding the world of Sadat, and given that he had tried to avoid this fate, this was an unambiguous message that the assassination was ordained.
Other methods of killing their leader had been proposed and rejected: an attack on Sadat’s helicopter was deemed impossible as he always took three of the five that the Egyptian army owned (as long as he wasn’t loaning them out to visiting movie stars – when Elizabeth Taylor arrived he addressed her as ‘Queen’, after her role as Cleo, and let her take one of his helicopters). Usually you never knew which one he was in.
An air attack on his rest-house next to the barrage (the very house, much adapted, that years before Mougel Bey and later Scott Moncrieff had directed operations from) was turned down by none other than Colonel Zumr on the grounds that death could not be guaranteed. Zumr, who hailed from the Nileside village next to the barrage, probably wished to spare his neighbourhood from being the centre of such an operation and the retaliation that followed. He would be arrested after the assassination and his life spared owing to his opposition to the attack. Zumr, who led an abortive uprising in the upper Nile town of Asyut, always believed that the shooting of Sadat was premature.
In another curious irony he would spend the duration of Mubarak’s regime in prison. When the Arab Spring revolution took place in 2011 he was released. He then, after thirty years in gaol, announced, ‘The coming period does not at all require armed struggle with the ruler.’ That the man who imprisoned him, Mubarak, is now himself in prison is rather bizarre.
Khaled went to his mentor Farag Atiya (the hunt for the flat apparently long ago given up) and told him of the role he had been given during the parade and his conviction that this was destined to be the moment to take Sadat’s life. Perhaps a factor that hardened Khaled’s resolve was that his elder brother in Mallawi was a member of one of the fundamentalist groups picked up by security forces on 3 September – twenty days before he received his orders to lead his section of the parade.
Khaled asked Farag to find two accomplices. In two days Farag rounded up three men including Muhammad Farag (no relation of the other whose first name was Farag), ‘the marksman’, who had been the army target-shooting champion seven years running. They all understood that ‘an element of martyrdom’ was involved. An element! This was wishful thinking, or perhaps an acute perception to keep feelings corralled, not let fear get in the way. All three must have known they would die, but all three agreed that it was worth it. All of them were either reserve or former soldiers doing civilian-type jobs and all had the trademark thick beards of religionists. These were dutifully shaved off before the mission. It was a curious enactment, sans irony, of the Arab cautionary saying to the over-religious, ‘I fear, my friend, that your beard is so long it is now mounting a challenge to the hair on your head.’ So, beardless, but still bearded in mind, they moved ever closer to their nightmare destination.
The one problem Khaled had was that the driver of the truck was the only driver in the unit, so there was no alternative to him, and certainly he was no sympathiser to their cause. He was scheduled for the parade and was indeed looking forward to it. Khaled’s proposed solution was to give him a sleeping pill before the event and then take over himself at the last minute. But when the conspirators tested a sleeping pill on Muhammad the marksman it had no effect, so the plan was abandoned. It was at this point that Khaled decided simply to force the driver to pull over at pistol point.
The next obstacle was an order, indicative of Sadat’s lack of trust in his own army, that all ammunition and all firing pins be removed before the parade. This caused Khaled some consternation, and with some difficulty Farag obtained four pistols, several grenades and some firing pins for automatic rifles. But it turned out that the collection of each section’s ammunition and firing pins would be conducted by the section leader – Lieutenant Khaled. It was doubly fortuitous since the illicitly obtained firing pins were obsolete and didn’t fit.
Getting his three accomplices into the truck had also been very easy. Despite the driver’s interest in taking part (maybe because he got to drive), the parade was not popular with soldiers. It meant hours of sitting in the sun without food and water. So finding places in the truck was easy. One soldier who should have attended was ill, and two more had requested leave – and were rather pleased that they both received it. The necessary identification and paperwork were all drawn up by Khaled, as this was his usual job anyway with regard to his section.
Having replaced three members of his team with the assassins, Khaled hinted that these new men were from ‘intelligence’, possibly there to keep an eye on everyone else. When officer Khaled shared his food with the new privates under his command, his batman was so surprised that he assumed that Khaled was trying to curry favour with the intelligence men.
The day before the parade all units were camping in tents. Khaled arrived with a battered Samsonite briefcase containing the ammunition and the firing pins. A brigadier drove through the camp with a loudspeaker and announced that all arms were to be concentrated in special storage tents. Khaled detailed two of his new men from ‘intelligence’ to be in charge of section security. On
e collected the firing pins while the other guarded the tent where all the arms were stored.
On the day of the parade, 6 October, Khaled and his men rose at 3 a.m., ready to move out at 6. Khaled took four Egyptian AKM assault rifles – semi-automatic machine guns with a collapsible stock – from the arms store in the tent and loaded them in the truck, placing four hand grenades in a helmet covered by a scarf. To identify the loaded weapons when stacked with the others of his section he placed a piece of cloth in the barrel of each ‘live’ gun.
The order was given to move off. Here, again, Khaled was lucky as his truck was on the right-hand side of a column of three, nearest to the reviewing stand.
At the parade six Mirage jets roared overhead spewing coloured smoke from their tailpipes. Everyone who was there remembered this and somehow linked it with the assassination. (During the 2011 revolution the appearance of jets over the Nile at Tahrir Square also signalled the end of Mubarak’s regime rather than, as he intended, its rejuvenescence.) It was at this very moment, which couldn’t have been planned better since it was so perfect a cover, that Khaled’s truck came alongside the parade stand. Sadat was at this point sitting down. Khaled pulled his Makerov pistol out and told the driver to pull over. The frightened man simply jammed on the brakes. Khaled did not try to argue, he just reached under the seat for the grenades and jumped out of the cab. He ran forward and at this juncture Sadat stood up, because he believed that this was part of the parade and the man approaching was there for a reason – to be greeted by his leader.
Khaled threw a grenade which landed in the stand at Sadat’s feet but did not explode. At this point Sadat should have dived for cover. Khaled threw another. By this time Muhammad the marksman had stood up in the back of the truck and taken careful aim, resting the rifle on the metal sidepiece of the open truck. He started to fire.
Some survivors later said that the irregular rifle shots sounded like a backfire. And, from the evidence of the 2011 revolution, they do sound similar, the only difference being the slightly more contained sound of the AKM. But it is an easy mistake to make, especially when you are not expecting rifle fire.
The nearest member of the Presidential Guard was Brigadier Sarhan. He ducked like everyone else and spent some time telling Sadat to duck too. But Sadat remained standing even when it became apparent that he was under attack – one interpretation is that his outsize ego just couldn’t comprehend his impotence. He reportedly shouted, ‘Mishma’oul! Mishma’oul!’ (Outrageous! Outrageous!) at Khaled before finally falling over. It was as if he believed so much in his own power that mere words of disapproval would stop the assassin’s bullet
A wave of panic swept over the 2,000 people in and around the main stand. Many later said they had believed that the jets were also attacking, that they were part of a co-ordinated assault. In the stand everyone shrank lower as Khaled approached, firing continuously. A third grenade exploded, and Muhammad and his fellow assassins jumped down from the truck (quite a height) and ran forward, firing from the shoulder. Khaled stood right in front of Sadat pumping round after round into him, though later reports suggested it was a ricochet and not a direct hit that killed him. He was hit thirty-seven times. Khaled reputedly shouted to Mubarak and others near to Sadat to get clear, that he only wanted to kill the President. For a good minute there was no opposition to the attackers. In fact Muhammad the marksman was not only uninjured, he managed in all the confusion to get clean away. Of the other attackers, Khaled Islambouli and Essam el-Qamari were wounded and taken prisoner – and beaten very badly. Both received cracked skulls and had their knees broken during interrogation. The fourth member of the team, who had elected to come on his own initiative, was killed in the attack. (It was at his house that the assassination team met and, though Khaled had asked for only two others, he was allowed to join.)
Sadat and seven others were killed and there were twenty-eight wounded.
In the footage of the assassination, as the firing continues you can see chairs being thrown towards Sadat in a vain attempt by the former Prime Minister Mamdouh Salem to protect him. Very soon after the firing had finished, Mubarak can be seen being hustled away to safety. Already people knew that Sadat was dead and were recognising Mubarak as the new leader.
Muhammad, the marksman who got away (on the film footage you can see the assassins scarpering like schoolboys out of an orchard where they have been caught pilfering), made his way to the house of his relatives. Perhaps he believed that the puny uprising co-ordinated by Colonel Zumr in Asyut would spread through the nation. Instead the security forces did what they always did and worked their way through his relatives until they found him. It is interesting to speculate that had Muhammad had an exit strategy in place – say a Bedouin smuggler willing to drive him across the Libyan border – he might well have escaped for good. Instead, he waited for a revolution that didn’t happen and found his martyr’s end along with Khaled Islambouli.
8 • Murder bros
All rivers want to join each other. Men say they do but live their lives differently. Sudanese proverb
Even assassinating world leaders can be a family business. Khaled’s brother attempted to assassinate Hosny Mubarak in Ethiopia in 1995.
Mubarak only narrowly avoided being killed by Muhammad Islambouli and other fellow terrorists. Outside Addis Ababa his quick-thinking driver, faced with gunmen, did a perfect reverse-skid turn and hightailed it back to the airport where the presidential jet was waiting with its engines running.
Incidentally, it was the security chief Omar Suleiman (who briefly took over after Mubarak was deposed) who saved Mubarak from a further attack by ordering the return to the plane. A little down the road was a second wave of assassins planning to finish the job. By the irony that invades the whole warp and weft of political intrigue along the Nile since the beginning of time, Khaled’s brother Muhammad had been one of the causes of Khaled’s involvement in the attack on Sadat in the first place. Khaled, it may be remembered, had taken up arms partly because of the incarceration of Muhammad. Now Muhammad had adopted the family trade against Mubarak. In all, Mubarak would survive six assassination attempts.
As for the assassins, their eighty-five-year-old mother Umm Khaled Islambouli unrepentantly told an interviewer in 2012 that she was ‘very proud’ of Khaled and Muhammad. Muhammad lived for years in Tehran, ‘where they named a street after him’. In an even less repentant move, his daughter married Osama bin Laden, and she and her child now live in Qatar. Muhammad eventually tired of Iran and flew back to Egypt. For a few years he was in prison, but he is now free and living in Egypt along with his mother.
One woman: two world-class assassins and a great-grandchild to the world’s most wanted terrorist. Children of the Red Nile.
9 • Do not forget this is a red river
A visitor is like a passing flood. Ethiopian proverb
Egypt is the gift of the Nile, wrote Herodotus (though my pal, the satirist Mahmoud Zeydan, calls Egypt ‘the git of the Nile’). Egyptians consider the Nile synonymous with Egypt. It is of course bigger than that. Our story has moved up and down the Nile as the Red Tale has taken us. Sometimes Egypt has been the focus, at other times Sudan or the very source regions in Uganda and Ethiopia. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the importance of control began to fragment as dams were proposed, breaking the river into sections. With the completion of the high dam Egypt entered a new phase of autonomy. For the first time in history, it was no longer dependent on the rains in central Africa and Ethiopia. But these places, the headwaters, are just as much the Nile. Indubitably they are part of the Red Nile, as the following horrific tale will show.
When a dead body falls in water the rate of putrefaction is altered, the ‘extinction of animal heat’ is accelerated, cadaveric rigidity sets in faster. And in creatures, including man, which are hunted to death, the onset of rigor mortis is especially quick. And these people were hunted to death.
But is this the right w
ay to begin this story? Surely the fact that the place has been doomed before may be by happenstance, but happenstance is still reportable, still lives on in our minds. This place, a river medium sized, brown with earth-carrying water, is how it looks; a brown washing machine is its only significant waterfall, the Rusomo Falls, a short, compact waterfall, brown water narrowed down. This is where the only bridge over the Kagera was built, the bridge that carried so many to safety as they fled in April 1994. What went under the bridge, what went down the river, cannot be forgotten.
Especially by the people of the lake. The people of the river killed their friends, enemies, neighbours, pupils, masters, but the people of the lake only endured. They had endured already one disaster, they would endure another. The lake people who lived by the mouth of the Kagera inhabited a place known as the landing, Kasensero landing place. A beach on the edge of Lake Victoria, a mile or so from the exit of the brown river, the Kagera, which snaked back into the diseased heart of Africa.
Kasensero was where the first case of ‘slim’ was diagnosed in the lake regions of central Africa in 1982. The first case of AIDS in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Though the disease had been fomenting in the Congo since the 1930s, it is believed, and had transferred to Haiti (many Haitians worked in the Congo in the 1960s and 1970s), it was from the doomed lakeside village of Kasensero that AIDS spread like the plague it was into Africa.
It was never a pleasant place. The landing attracted displaced people, drifters, people unwelcome in their own villages. The fishermen were often drunk, it was said. They made full use of the large number of prostitutes in town. From these people, from this town, the disease spread across the lake into Kenya and Tanzania and down the highways of Africa to Zambia and Zimbabwe. It spread north to Kinshasa and Entebbe.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 51