I don’t know why the baby boy had been dumped before first light for me to find this morning. I have no idea where the body had been since Boxing Day – most people had died on impact; many had been in their beds. It seemed odd and desperate but equally considered and deliberate. Was I wrong to think it was calculated or had I misunderstood a grief-stricken parent on the point of breakdown?
It didn’t matter. I picked it up with my bare hands, and looked around. Nobody was watching. I walked over to the rubbish which night after night would pile high in the streets waiting for the authorities to burn the next day by the side of the roads to stave off the threat of rats. Removing some cardboard from the tip, I covered the baby with it.
‘What’s that, Craig?’ I heard a voice say. It was Bob, the Australian paramedic who was staying next door to us. I walked towards him. He didn’t need me to answer. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.
My response was instant, and came from the mouth of a soldier in the zone and on autopilot. My sole priority was to protect the BBC crew from infection.
‘I’m going to burn it,’ I answered.
‘That’s the best thing to do.’
There was no way I was going to leave the baby in a bag for someone else to pick up later, and there was no other way – where could we put it? Bob went to get some petrol from the jerrycan, while I hastily made an opening in the rubbish and grabbed a box that we had used to store water. I placed the box in the centre of all the other stuff we had chucked out and laid the baby down. When Bob came back, I soaked the lot in petrol, then set fire to it.
As I stood back, smoke and intense flames burned among cardboard, disused toilet rolls and food containers – a putrid, charred smell everywhere, more than if it had just been the daily rubbish burn. We moved upwind of the smell to avoid it. It was out in ten minutes. Bob and I bagged up the rubbish, bits of wood and plastic still smouldering. I didn’t look to see the remains of the baby; both our heads looking down while shovelling. Nothing was said. We just got on with it. We may have left a skull on the floor – I can’t recall. I just wanted it done. Bob thought the boy had already been dead for two to three days.
I saw Peter Leng standing at the door. I had no choice but to come clean. I told him we had to keep this to ourselves – I didn’t want anyone else to find out.
‘I wondered what all the flies were,’ he replied. ‘How do you feel about it?’
‘It’s a sad situation, but I am surprised someone has dumped it on our doorstep,’ I answered bluntly.
Only years later did Peter confess that he had told a couple of people – he also said he was grateful and couldn’t have done the same thing. Peter and Bob may have looked at it differently but I was in operational mode. In the same way that I’d lied to Stuart Hughes about playing for Wales, and that we gave little thought to Kaveh’s funeral on the day that the Americans bombed us, any emotions were saved for later. Right now, I was working and this was the job I had to do. If they were still alive, I couldn’t give the parents that closure because there were no clues on the baby. I didn’t know how it had got here but I felt sure it was orphaned and deliberately dumped. I couldn’t change its fate. I did what I had to do. There were no alternatives but to cremate the baby. It was the most humane thing to do, before it became riddled with maggots and was left to rot in the street. I couldn’t put a sign up outside the house saying ‘One ex-baby here – please knock’. If the parents hadn’t died, why would they dump it?
I pride myself in my work; nobody got sick on that trip. Nobody even came close to diarrhoea and I knew that I had done my job keeping everyone healthy. I ran a tight ship, ensuring everyone always washed their hands with wet wipes. The baby was an obstacle to their health; the next day it would be a blocked toilet. I hadn’t known it was coming but I had to deal with it, and I would do the same again. Perhaps I could have taken a second opinion but the soldier in me stood up and made a decision. The rules of war applied here. What I mean by that is that the rules of war constantly re-define themselves as horrors unfold before you and you make split-second decisions. There was no textbook or BBC course for something like this.
Emotionally, too, while everyone else in that house had seen more than enough, they didn’t need to see this. My duty was to make sure they never knew. I didn’t think it was a story for Ben – we had filmed nothing but bodies, and even though it wasn’t my place to editorialise on this occasion, I just couldn’t see that this was something we would report on, even if every day was now becoming the same journalistically. Ben wouldn’t be able to trace the baby. Lottery odds were better. I made that call and I stand by it today. Other than Peter, nobody who woke in that house that morning would ever know.
It was done. I had stuff to be getting on with. So did Bob. We agreed to catch up later. I washed my hands and put the kettle on. As one by one the team came down, I carried on as though nothing had happened.
‘Thanks for your help with that business this morning,’ I said to Bob later. We both agreed that it stayed between us. My only wavering concerned whether to tell our fixer Ivan to see if I had offended local custom. I chose not to. In the end we had been as busy as normal, as I went out filming with Andrew Harding then did the cooking in the evening. It might have helped, I don’t know. I was able to move on very quickly.
It was after midnight in Banda Aceh before I rang Sue. She was the only person I ever discussed it with in detail. I stood alone in the street on the Sat Phone – nobody could see me in the pitch black. ‘How’s things?’ I asked. ‘Been busy at work?’
Over the years, I had perfected the small talk call home that normally began with functional stuff about the mail and ended abruptly with me making an excuse to go. Sometimes she would say she had seen Ben or John on the news and ask if I was with them. Beyond that, she didn’t take much notice, and left me to it. She knew my addiction to the next story and war zone would never leave me. It was just one of those unspoken things. Only I really got what happened in my job and she would let me get on with it. Then I would be home again.
Among all those minutes and all those miles spent talking crap from various places around the world, I will never forget this call. ‘I had to do something I have never done before,’ I began.
‘What did you do?’ she replied.
And I told her.
There was nothing. Seconds of silence felt like minutes. ‘Are you still there?’ I asked. She was taking it all in. I knew I had to tell her. I didn’t need to confide in her – I wanted to tell her. I always did. Craig the rock didn’t need a rock himself but she was my soul mate. There was no way I wouldn’t.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked.
‘It had to be done. Pretty normal day though, really. Not a lot happening.’ Then I changed the subject back to the post.
‘Any idea when you’re coming home?’ she asked.
I had already made plans. My replacement was arriving imminently and we would be home for 11 January. Ivan, the fixer, had already asked me if we would ever return and I replied that we would see what would happen – that was the way my life was panning out. No longer the top story on the Ten, we’d been living in a shithole for the best part of two weeks. My only wash had been when we got caught in a monsoon and I took the shower gel outside and stripped down to my boxers. For our hardship, the Beeb offered us a £250 bonus – fuck all after the tax. At least Paul Greeves said ‘job well done’.
Plus, I had to return to Baghdad a week later to re-unite with John Simpson – the Iraqi elections were calling.
KATE
Paul Greeves was back on the phone. ‘We need you to fly to Nairobi to carry out an investigation.’
Kate Peyton was dead.
I had gone straight from Indonesia to the Gulf. In the process we made a special trip to Kameron’s family to present them with our Royal Television Society Award for the Friendly Fire programme. Now, a senior BBC producer had been gunned down in one of the most lawless spots in the world.
In 2005, the Transitional Government of Somalia was at the helm. Kate and Peter Greste, a former freelancer from Kenya who had spent much of his career in the region, were sent to cover their return to power. There was talk that it was a trip Kate hadn’t wanted to make.
I had first met her in Johannesburg in 2001; we had been in Israel together, too, and I had last seen her back in South Africa at the end of 2003 while I carried out a security review. Of medium height with brown mousy hair, she was a rarity in this business – very easy going, kind and happy to help; quite caring in the strange selfish world of the media. We had nothing in common.
In 2003 she had met a cameraman and they were trying to adopt an African girl together. She was her usual self, told me how happy she was, but there was an undercurrent that made me think something wasn’t quite right. I later found out that her position in the – she didn’t want to have to return to England. Her decision to go to Somalia turned out to be fatal.
This was all I knew before I flew out – my colleague John Glendinning had carried out the risk assessment. There had been a specific threat to Western journalists but nothing direct to any individual organisation. Even though this was one of the most dangerous places in the world, one with links to al Qaeda, where aid workers can suddenly disappear off the radar and the local law of silence tends to prevail, we knew people at home wanted to see the story. Prior to the trip, we would do the maximum amount of groundwork possible through the vast networks of contacts and fixers around the world. The BBC had a Somali service in Nairobi. They would be as prepared as for any trip to any part of the world. Everyone knew danger was part of the job.
Kate, Peter and our fixer Aulad Hussain had landed in the Somali capital on the morning of 9 February. She would be dead by the evening.
Touching off the African Express flight from Nairobi, Aulad took them straight to the Shamu Hotel for a briefing lunch with an AP photographer, Karel Prinsloo. He explained that they had been following the government for the past fortnight without incident, bar one moment where a burst of .50 calibre was fired close to officials and the press. After lunch, they visited an internet café, with eight gunmen as an escort.
By early afternoon, Kate and Peter had decided to go to the Sahafi Hotel, where the government was holding court at a press conference. In tow, they had two ‘technicals’ – armoured vehicles, one of which was equipped with a 50-calibre machine gun. The place was rammed with security people. Nobody paid much attention to the BBC.
Peter told me later that it was a really relaxed atmosphere. In a place like this, you can never get too comfy, and because of the huge number of vehicles and guards milling round, the hotel compound was rammed. That, unfortunately, left Kate and Peter exposed.
At 14.05, they left the compound. Their driver couldn’t access the hotel. On this moment alone hung Kate’s life.
Kate had her back to the street as they waited for their car; Peter was facing the building. Suddenly one single shot rang out. Kate fell against the vehicle, moaning. Peter pulled her round to the passenger side, opened the passenger door and laid her down on the back seat. She had been a stationary target.
That’s all he could remember initially – like all these things it had happened so fast. They had been parked under a palm tree at the perimeter walls – the two technicals were on either side and the government cars were either side of the BBC and the technicals. Kate had her headscarf on, covering her face. At the moment she reached for the passenger door one car drove past and opened fire. Logistically, it was a horrible mess. That BBC car should have been in the compound, and Kate and Peter needed to be on the move. She didn’t stand a chance.
Within fifteen minutes, Kate was at the hospital. One of the technicals had raced off after a dark Sedan, which the locals had fingered as the getaway vehicle. By the time they got there all they found in it was a pistol, an AK-47 and a copy of the Koran. It seemed a random shooting. Kate was talking all the way to the Red Cross Hospital at Medina. Pete said she was very responsive. When they got there, he rang Kate’s Bureau Chief, Milton Nkosi. They needed a Medevac fast. Kate was well enough to converse. Pete needed to know as much as he could.
‘Am I going to die?’ she asked him. ‘Get me to Johannesburg.’ To me, that question now had an all-too-familiar ring to it.
Between 14.30 and 14.40, Kate was taken straight to surgery. There was little Peter could do at this point except call Malcolm Downing on the desk in London, while the medical teams prepared to operate, scouring the building for blood supplies. They were so low on donors that by 15.30, the stock of O Negative was empty. They had spent the previous three-quarters of an hour asking everyone in the hospital. There were three possible matches.
During surgery, one of the doctors carried out the now imperative transfusion. These guys knew what they were doing – if anybody saw gunshot wounds as their bread and butter, it was the medics in this part of the world. There was also an English nurse, Rachel Byers, in attendance. By 15.40, Kate was stabilising. At 16.00, Peter was told that Kate was in no danger – her spleen had been removed, she had minor damage to the liver and the bullet had been extracted. Shortly after that, her vital signs were improving and she was breathing on her own.
Rachel had advised that Kate should not be moved before the morning unless a full medical team was present. That was a problem in itself because there was no night strip to land on. The plane would have to land early the next morning.
Suddenly, her condition worsened and she needed to be moved there and then. She was fading but Peter had left, rightly believing that this was the time to go as things had become considerably better than initially feared.
Back at the hotel, Ajaf the security manager told him everything he knew about the vehicle, and crucially that he believed it to be owned by a man named Afgi whose organisation had been involved in a couple of incidents over the past few months in the Horn of Africa. These included a grenade attack and rifle shots at a radio station; a journalist had also been beaten and tortured. This car had history, and word about the attack had spread fast.
Peter went upstairs to pack all the equipment together while Karel sat with Kate at the hospital. Kate’s shooting clearly meant it was time to go, just as Fred Scott and Dragan had done before. That short trip back to the hotel was one Peter would regret forever. He’d hardly got started when his phone rang. ‘Get back to the hospital urgently.’ It was Karel.
Kate died at 20.25. Paul asked me if I would be prepared to go in to help recover Kate. I said yes, but it looked like it wasn’t going to happen, as Milton would surely get there before us for this sad duty.
Then we left at 10.00 the next day.
All I knew at this stage was that what had happened was very unfortunate. She was a good journo, and she died doing the job she loved, but the cloud hanging over the trip she felt she had to make would now linger forever. I needed to know more about that, too.
Consequently, as well as bringing the body back, I knew there would be questions asked internally, as many within the Corporation as on the street in which she was killed. Did she have a right to say no to this mission? What effect would this death have on every trip from now on? As matters stood now, hindsight told us that Kate’s personal plans meant nothing when life was taken away from you. I did feel considerable sympathy as we landed in Nairobi, but equally I was getting into the zone, well aware that what I reported back would be enshrined in BBC Health and Safety policy forever and probably be part of evidence at any future inquest or court proceedings back home. That was what my job was all about and for that reason alone, despite feeling genuine warmth and respect for Kate, I adopted my usual robotic attitude.
London were dealing with Kate’s family. It wasn’t my place to put in a call. Apart from Paul ringing me to say we were going, the only person I’d spoken to was John Glendinning. He sent me over the watertight risk assessment that he had done on Mogadishu before Kate had left South Africa. This was proper, thorou
gh professional security work from John – none of the nonsense that wasted so much of our time. This was what we were hired to do, and if Kate’s death served any purpose it should be to remind us of just that.
I had to speak to as many people as possible, but in reality there weren’t that many and in a place like this the key players would inevitably have gone to ground. Definitely on my radar were Karel and Rachel but my first port of call after landing in the Kenyan capital on the night of 10 February was Milton Nkosi’s bedroom in the Norfolk Hotel.
I had to wake him. He had endured the day from hell, flying in from South Africa and getting into Mogadishu – unbeknown to me, he had already recovered Kate’s body.
‘Fuck, what am I gonna do?’ I thought. That was my job, and I was desperate to get into Somalia to smell the scent of crime and to eyeball the liars. Paul Greeves and I could see that the operation was ahead of us already. We had no choice but to sleep on it and make a plan the next morning.
At breakfast, we decided to split up the roster of potential witnesses. We definitely needed the surgeon’s account of how Kate could just have slipped away when it was looking like she would make it. My instinct already told me that if she had been shot in the UK, she might have pulled through.
Her partner Roger had now turned up, too, along with the little girl the two of them had been hoping to adopt. I didn’t really get to know him but he bore the look of a Congolese guy who had seen this all too many times before.
The extraction of Kate’s body turned out to be a key moment in what we would learn and what we could take back as fact. It was determined that there was no need for us to return to Mogadishu. We would conduct all our enquiries by phone from Nairobi.
I was told it was too dangerous to go back in and that we would put others at risk. Danger was what I did and I had to get in there. I would deal with any consequences after the event. It was simply bullshit to conduct an investigation into one of your own down the phone. I needed to get to that hotel compound, walk that street where Kate had been felled, and see the vehicles involved. Then I needed to get face to face with Ajaf in the hotel. To say this was unsatisfying was an understatement. In effect, I was an on-duty policeman reduced to taking statements.
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