Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  While I was still in recovery, a Kuwaiti patient was wheeled in. He had been stabbed and robbed, he was frightened, and he tried to get up and walk out, ripping the epidural out of his back. There was clearly a language barrier between him and the nurses but I was too exhausted to interpret. Eventually I could stand it no longer and I waded in. Fu’ad, the Kuwaiti, was so grateful, but what must he think of our country? I thought.

  Six weeks after my op, the surgeons pronounced me fit enough to resume aggressive physiotherapy, including standing upright in the standing frame. A weighing chair was fetched to check my weight. I had gone from eleven stone down to eight: I had not weighed so little since I was in flannel shorts. My bum was so scrawny that my sacral bones sat directly on the chair with very little natural padding. My tolerance for sitting was limited to a few hours at a time, and I had to use an inflatable plastic cushion to go beneath me in the bath. My new colostomy bag filled with air every thirty minutes, with a noise like a whoopy cushion. If this continued once I returned to work and happened while I was broadcasting live, it would give a whole new meaning to being ‘on air’.

  In April 2005, ten months after being shot, I went back to work at the BBC. Everyone made a huge and slightly embarrassing fuss of me as I wheeled myself back through the glass doors of Television Centre, a journey that some, I suspect, probably thought I would never make. For the first and probably last time in my TV career I was directed down a corridor to one of the celebrity dressing rooms, where make-up and managers fawned over me in equal measure. It made a pleasant change from nurses with hypodermic needles. Then it was up a ramp and on to the set of Breakfast News, where Dermot and Natasha gave me one of the kindest, most compassionate interviews I have ever known. After so many years of covering the news as a reporter it felt very strange to be making it, but also a little disconcerting to be greeting old friends at belly-button height. Jonathan Baker, who had worked so hard to get me safely back from Riyadh, arranged a wine-and-sandwich reunion lunch for me with all the World Affairs correspondents. I gave a short speech, mumbling something about how good it was to be back, and then took a renewed interest in two of my colleagues who were also disabled, Stuart Hughes, who had lost part of his leg to a landmine in Iraq but now went jogging with his prosthetic limb, and Driss Makaoui, a Moroccan producer with lifelong polio, callipers, crutches and biceps the size of a tree trunk.

  It was an emotional but happy time for me, seeing so many friendly faces, so many people who had steeled themselves to hear I had not lived through that first night after the attack, and had then willed me to recover. The TV presenter Fiona Bruce and her team in Manchester made a whole programme about my ordeal for BBC1’s Real Story. They even tracked down Peter Bautz, the surgeon who saved me, in his new workplace in Australia. ‘Frank fell into the category of the very, very seriously injured,’ he said. The film showed me struggling to walk with callipers at Stanmore, and in a rather pathetic attempt at a walking piece-to-camera I recounted how all of us there in the Spinal Injuries Unit dreamed every night that we were able-bodied again and how when we woke up we wished the dream was reality and our waking hours had been just a nightmare. People came up to me in the street for weeks afterwards to tell me how the film had inspired them, which made me glad I had taken part in it.

  The following month I felt strong enough to make a day-return trip to Geneva to interview a half-brother of Osama Bin Laden for the six o’clock news. This was perfectly safe – Yeslam Bin Laden is a peaceful, legitimate businessman – but the trip was still a mistake. The interview went fine, although our guest admitted he had barely known the maverick member of the Bin Laden family, but I was exhausted by two flights and a fourteen-hour working day. I was simply not capable of working the kind of hours I had done before my injuries.

  I had hoped that after twelve surgical operations my ordeal in hospitals would have come to an end, but not quite. In the summer of 2005 a CT scan revealed two sizeable bladder stones, each measuring over 2cm across. Just as the doctors had feared, they were a by-product of having had a catheter inserted through my abdominal wall for so long.

  ‘We’d better book him TCI,’ said the urology nurse.

  ‘TCI?’ I asked. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘it’s just short for “To Come In”.’

  In September I was admitted to hospital to have the bladder stones removed. A doctor came over to my bed, drew the curtains and explained what they were going to do to me.

  ‘You laser them, right?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m afraid not. We use a process known as cystolitholopaxy. We insert a device up through the penis which then uses crocodile-like jaws to crush the stones into smaller fragments which can be drained out.’

  He saw my look of abject horror and added, ‘Don’t worry, you will be under general anaesthetic while we do this.’

  I noticed the doctor’s name was Khaled Shendi, a place in northern Sudan. Sure enough, he was from the town of Shendi, which I had once passed through on the roof of a train. When I told him I had spent the night sleeping on a slab at Khartoum General Hospital back in 1983, he could hardly believe it. He said he had been a junior doctor in training there at that time.

  But despite this pleasant interlude, I could not take my mind off the grisly operation I was about to undergo. This time even the anaesthetic was abnormally painful. After a cannula had been inserted into a vein in the back of my hand, I remember staring up at the ceiling art and complaining of an intense burning pain spreading up my hand into my arm. I felt like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix after he took the hallucinogenic pill. Later the surgeons presented me with a test tube containing some of the debris they had removed: it resembled something from the Geological Museum. For days afterwards I was bleeding from the most sensitive part of my anatomy, and an infection led to a fever that it took nearly a week to bring down with antibiotics.

  Meanwhile, I was struggling to keep up my physiotherapy sessions with the tireless Julie, in between working long hours after the London bombings, writing this book, catching up lost time with my family, and then getting set back several days when I was in too much pain to walk with callipers. A major landmark for me came in the summer of 2005, when for the first time since my injuries I attended a company’s annual party standing up in callipers, supporting myself on a frame and watched over by my loyal and conscientious researcher, Katie Pearson. I was extremely wary of being knocked over so I backed myself up against a wall and ‘held court’, as it were. A retired general came up to me to say how proud it had made him to see me ‘walking’ in with the frame. He told me that when he had heard my interview about the attack on Radio 4 on Christmas Eve, he was so choked with emotion he had had to stop the car before he drove into a hedge.

  In September 2005 I returned to Stanmore’s Spinal Injuries Unit for a week’s physiotherapy. I had a single goal in mind: to conquer the stairs. At first, the eversensible Almari, my physiotherapist, was reluctant to let me try, seeing how unsteady I was when walking with callipers and crutches. But I persisted and with her help I made it up a flight of twenty steps, going up backwards, which for some reason is easier, using one hand on the railing and the other on a crutch to power myself upwards. It was slow and exhausting and I found myself letting out a Serena Williams-like grunt each time I launched myself up a step, but it gave me a huge sense of achievement: these were the first stairs I had climbed in sixteen months.

  Less encouraging was a visit to the bone-density clinic. A few minutes under the laser scan revealed that I had developed osteoporosis in my hips and legs: through lack of use, the bone density had declined to a worrying level. This came as a shock, as it had never occurred to me that I would need to worry about something like this for at least another thirty years.

  ‘Just make sure you don’t fall over,’ smiled the technicians.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What will happen?’

  They exchanged knowing glances; probably every conversation went like t
his. ‘Well, you’re quite likely to fracture your bones, that’s all.’

  That’s all? Argh. I just could not face the prospect of being laid up again in a hospital bed – or any bed, for that matter – for months on end. My consultant, Dr Gall, was brisk and breezy, though. In her soft Scottish brogue, she reassured me that this was a common condition – even astronauts get it when they spend too long in space, she told me – and it was reversible. I would just have to carve out some time each day to walk in my callipers, however much it got in the way of whatever else I was doing.

  Being told I had osteoporosis at forty-four was a bit of a blow, but it was hard to feel sorry for myself when I looked around the ward at my fellow patients. This time I was the only one with an injury low down on the spinal column; the others all had neck injuries, which meant they could hardly move anything below the shoulders. As I wheeled myself back from a session in the gym I would see them being hoisted, helpless as a baby, from their chairs on to their beds. Nurses would feed them and bathe them, and often the sickly smell of evacuated bowels would hang over the ward. In the world of spinal-cord injury and paralysis, no two cases are identical and everyone compares their own condition to those of others. I could see that the tetraplegics eyed me with envy, but I in turn found myself envying a patient who had been confined to a wheelchair after her epidural went wrong, but who was now up and walking around with only a stick for support. She, of course, envied all the completely able-bodied nurses and physios around her.

  Stanmore in the warm, soft light of late summer was a good place to practise my calliper walking and I soon found the confidence to break out of the gym by myself and totter slowly along a path through an orchard. As I paused to lean against some railings, I caught my reflection in the window of the gym. I saw a man in a T-shirt standing almost upright, leaning forward as if to chat to a friend; he looked fit and slightly tanned. Suddenly I recognized in that reflection my old self, the person I had been for so many years before I was gunned down and crippled. It was like looking at an old photo album, but this was not the past, this was here and now. I realized in that moment that, despite everything that has happened to me and all the painful and unwelcome changes I have had to go through, I can make this thing work. I can, I think, rediscover the love of life that made every day worth living and will do so again. I will get through this.

  10

  Making Sense of It All

  No evidence has come to light which suggests that Mr Cumbers and Mr Gardner had been targeted before they entered the Al-Suweidi area.

  Joint UK/Saudi Investigators’ Report

  WHO SHOT US in Riyadh and why were they so determined to kill us? These were the questions that played over and over in my mind throughout those long months in hospital. Had we been followed from our hotel? Set up by our Saudi minders? Was there anything I could have said or done that could have saved us from those bullets?

  I was to get my answers. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador in Riyadh who had helped save my life on the night of our attack, lobbied hard for a full investigation by the Saudi authorities. Sharing their findings with foreigners, let alone a journalist, was not something that came naturally to them, but in the early summer of 2005 I got a call from SO13, Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch. After months of delay, the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, were finally here in London to give Louise, Simon’s widow, and me a face-to-face account of their investigation.

  June 29th was a fabulous summer’s day, the sort of day when the last thing you feel like doing is sitting in an office and hearing how someone tried to murder you. But we had work to do, so it was off to the Yard, through security, and up in the lift to the Anti-Terrorist Branch Commander’s office. The London bombings were still a week away and SO13 had plenty of time to give us. The view across London was spectacular, right across Parliament, the Thames, the London Eye and out to the low hills of Kent on the horizon. Reluctantly, I swivelled my wheelchair round, turned my back on the view and prepared to meet the Saudi detectives.

  One by one they filed in, five of them in all, clearly edgy but bearing formal messages of goodwill from their Ministry of Interior headquarters in Riyadh. I later learned that it was quite unprecedented for the Mabahith to come over to Britain to talk to victims of Saudi terrorism like this. ‘They would have been nervous,’ a diplomat told me. ‘They probably gave you false names to protect their identities. Remember, these are people very much in Al-Qaeda’s sights back home.’ For seven hours we sat there, breaking only for lunch in the police canteen. Fortunately, our Saudi visitors did not seem to notice that the roast of the day was a great glistening joint of gammon, pork being haraam, forbidden, to Muslims.

  I listened, spellbound, as the Saudis gave us a blow-by-blow account of how they believe the attack on us was carried out. ‘We are sorry we have taken so long to come here,’ said their team leader, a genial captain, ‘but we have been working on new information which we want to tell you about now. In fact there were not five people who attacked you, but six. The sixth person’s name is Adel; we have him in custody, but he is very severely wounded from a recent gun battle. We are keeping him alive so he can tell us everything and we can bring him to justice.’

  The Saudi detectives then painted a quite terrifying picture of what happened that Sunday in June 2004. While we were filming in Al-Suwaidi district, they said, a team of four Al-Qaeda members happened to be travelling from the north of Riyadh to the south where we were, for a meeting with the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Abdulaziz Al-Muqrin, and his entourage. Soon after the two groups met up they drove past us and spotted us filming, and immediately pulled into a nearby sidestreet to discuss what to do about us. Al-Muqrin decided we should be killed, since we were Westerners and therefore ‘infidels’, non-Muslims, and this was Arabia, the land of the two holy mosques. (If we had had a police escort I am convinced they would have left us alone.) A senior member of the group, Faisal Al-Dakheel, took charge. (I read later that he had been with Bin Laden at Tora Bora in Afghanistan and had fled to Pakistan in 2001.) One member was assigned to kill the infidel cameraman, another the infidel reporter. So while I was delivering my piece-to-camera and Simon was filming, our fates were already being decided in the neighbouring street. They were to use the personal weapons they always carried, in this case automatic 9mm pistols. The Al-Qaeda leader, Al-Muqrin, was to sit back at some distance in his Nissan Pathfinder jeep to watch the hit go down.

  It began with a man called Abdullah Al-Subaei walking up to me and greeting me in Arabic, ‘Asalaamu aleikum,’ ‘Peace be upon you.’ He was the young, almost pleasant-looking man I remembered approaching me. When I responded in Arabic, giving the stock response to his greeting, that apparently threw him. Perhaps I was a Muslim. But why did I look like a Westerner? Then he remembered his orders. He was here to kill me. So he pulled out his pistol and at that point I ran for my life. The police believe I was then brought down with a pistol shot from Faisal Al-Dakheel, who had dismounted from the second vehicle, the van I remember with the sliding doors.

  ‘He fired seven bullets at you. Three of them missed, four of them hit you,’ said the detectives. How on earth he could have missed at point-blank range I don’t know, but since I was on the ground and he was standing that would explain why the bullets I took in the lumbar/pelvic area were all from behind. Faisal Al-Dakheel had stood there and shot me repeatedly while I lay helpless in the dirt. Since the hospital records show me as having been hit by six bullets with a total of eleven wounds, someone else may well have joined in. Then, when I was lying motionless on the ground hearing those footsteps approaching, one of the cell members got out and tried to buckle the numberplate of the minivan so it couldn’t be recognized. ‘We had a lot of trouble over that van,’ said the detectives. ‘They hid it inside a garage for weeks, that’s why we could not locate it at first.’

  My attackers then drove off, which I also remember. As for what happened to Simon, their s
tory differed considerably from what we had always been told. When the British and Irish ambassadors had gone to the scene of the crime three days after it happened, together with Louise, a BBC delegation and a close protection escort, they were shown a place about a kilometre away where Simon had reportedly been killed. They were told he had run for his life all that way, carrying his heavy camera, but unable to find cover had been shot dead. Now they were saying he had died instantly, almost as soon as the attack began. Louise, understandably, has been pressing the Saudis ever since for evidence of how her husband died.

  Simon Cumbers, said the Saudi detectives, had made a dash for the door of our own van as soon as he realized we were under attack. But they said he was shot inside the van and died instantly, while the driver accelerated away to safety. It was to be a further eight months before this story was finally backed up by hard evidence.

  In Scotland Yard, the Saudi detectives now asked me if I felt strong enough to see photos of what had become of the terrorists who attacked us. I did. Five out of the six were dead, they said, all killed in shoot-outs with the security forces last year. Only Simon’s alleged murderer, Adel, was still alive and he was the one critically injured. One by one they silently passed me a set of gruesome A4-sized photos. There was Al-Muqrin, the local Al-Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia, eyes closed, beard blood-stained, killed in a gun battle only a few days after our attack. There too was Faisal Al-Dakheel, the man I’m told shot me in the back and left me for dead. He was apparently killed in the same shoot-out in June 2004, but his once cruel-looking features were now unrecognizable. The photo they showed me was of someone with a face puffed up in death, with one side distorted by wounds. There were others they showed me, all hideously disfigured. As if reading my doubts, the detectives assured us they had done DNA checks on all the corpses. ‘We are still investigating,’ they said. ‘We will tell you if anything changes.’