Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  So there it was, closure of sorts for me. An apparently opportunistic attack, a case of bad luck, the wrong place at the wrong time. But when I think of what these people did it disgusts me. To say ‘Peace be upon you’ and then immediately pull out a gun to kill you makes a mockery of the universal Muslim greeting of peace and goodwill. To shoot another human being, an unarmed civilian, when he is already wounded and helpless on the ground and begging for mercy, is surely despicable in any religion. ‘I pray every day,’ said a normally gentle Saudi friend of mine on the phone a few days after my meeting with the detectives. ‘I pray that the people who did this are burning in hell right now. They have brought shame on our religion and on our country. They are beyond forgiveness.’

  The first anniversary of the Riyadh attack in June 2005 was tough on all of us. For Amanda, it brought back vivid memories of those terrible days when she thought she had lost me, of flying out to Riyadh not knowing if she was already a widow, of sitting day after day at my hospital bedside, signing countless consent forms for emergency operations while I lay inert and motionless, hooked up to drips and monitors. For me it was not so much the past that troubled me, it was and still is my new-found paraplegia. I never thought that one year after the attack I would still be in a wheelchair, unable to do the things I had taken for granted all my life. But I can only imagine what this anniversary must have been like for Simon’s widow, Louise, and for his family back in Ireland.

  The tragedy of Simon’s death has introduced me to this kind and big-hearted family which I would never otherwise have met. In April I went over to Dublin with my own family to see them and to appear on RTE’s Late Late Show, which is considered Ireland’s premier TV show, going out live every Friday night and watched by over six million people. In the chic bar of our hotel, Andrea Corr the singer and Colin Farrell the actor were mingling with guests, but on the other side of town I was bracing myself to appear before a live studio audience, not something I had done before. I found it immensely calming to see Bob Cumbers, Simon’s father, and the rest of his family, sharing a few drinks before the show in the Green Room. Then, just after I had been wheeled up a ramp on to the set during a commercial break and seconds before the lights came up and the host Pat Kenny began the interview, disaster struck. A well-meaning but clumsy make-up lady insisted I needed a dab of powder beneath the eyes and promptly jabbed her thumb into my eyeball. Tears immediately flowed down the right side of my face and I could see some of the audience shaking their heads sadly, probably whispering, ‘Poor lad, he’s obviously terribly upset.’ I knew I would find it difficult to talk about Simon, but I could have done without appearing to be in tears before the interview had even started. But Pat Kenny was a pro and he deftly steered the interview between humour and sadness, at one point stepping into the audience to interview Bob, who reeled off the details of his son’s impressive and multi-talented journalistic career.

  The next day Bob Cumbers and I made the journey I had thought so often about while I was in hospital: to lay flowers at Simon’s grave in Greystones, County Wicklow. It was one of those soft, muted Irish days when it was hard to tell which season you were in. A fine drizzle fell about the gentle hills and a mist enveloped the shores of the Irish Sea as we approached the cemetery. ‘Simon and his cousins used to spend all their summers in Greystones,’ said his father, and his widow Louise had chosen it as the final resting place for the man who was everything in her life. Simon loved mountains so he was buried in the shadow of County Wicklow’s Sugar Loaf Mountain.

  Bob and I had the cemetery to ourselves and I cannot remember how long we stayed there, Bob standing, me sitting in my wheelchair, while the rain fell without a sound, both of us deep in our private thoughts. It was one of the saddest moments of my life, staring immobile at that simple gravestone. ‘Simon Peter Cumbers 1968–2004 Rest in Peace’. He was just thirty-six years old when a Saudi terrorist shot him, and all for some twisted, pointless cause. There were others at the BBC who knew Simon much better than I did, but he was one of those rare people with such natural charisma you only had to be with him for five minutes and you felt you had known him a lifetime. Unhealthy as it was to think such thoughts, I could not help thinking, Oh Simon, if only you had got away, what times we would have had on each anniversary of the shooting, meeting up in the corner of some pub, toasting our lifelong bond of survival against adversity. Yet, although I am not especially religious, I know that Simon is up there somewhere, willing me to pick up my journalistic career from the point where it was so very nearly terminated.

  In the best of Irish traditions Bob and I went straight from the cemetery to the pub. He took me to Johnny Fox’s, reputedly the highest pub in Ireland and a clandestine gathering place during the rebellion against British rule in the last century. Outside, the rain fell in sheets, but a log fire crackled in the bar and more than one Guinness drinker came up to tell us how much Simon’s story had touched them when they watched it on the Late Late Show the previous night. I found it awkward, to say the least, looking up at people from my wheelchair; it was not a situation I had ever expected to be in. But knowing where Simon’s final resting place is and being able to picture it whenever I want has given me a certain peace of mind.

  Somehow, I have found a way to deal with the horror of being shot. It happened and I can’t undo it. Coming to terms with being disabled is a different matter. Almost everything has changed. At the risk of sounding morbid, so many of the things I enjoyed have been taken away – jogging along the Thames towpath with friends at the weekend, roller-blading with my daughters, chasing them through the park and showing them how to climb trees, and trekking through jungles, deserts and mountains, which I enjoyed more than anything. Almost every single aspect of daily life requires an effort that was not needed before, from lifting up my legs with my hands to swing them off the bed, to lowering myself into the bath using just my arms, from straining forward and nearly falling off my wheelchair to unload the dishwasher, to having to project my voice upwards so it can reach everyone else at their head height. Every single journey I undertake, whether it be a taxi ride to west London or a flight to a European city, necessitates help from other people somewhere along the way. Before, I revelled in spontaneity, being able to just sling a bag over my shoulder and walk out of the door in five minutes flat; now I have to go through a mental checklist. Do I have enough medication for where I am going? Are there going to be steps involved, in which case who is going to get me up and down them? Is the vehicle I will be travelling in going to have room for my wheelchair, and will I be able to lift myself up on to the passenger seat? Does the place I am going to have disabled-access toilets? Will the lift be so small that there is no room for the wheelchair, meaning I cannot actually get upstairs to join everyone else for lunch? And how long can I last before I have to lie down on my side to ease my emaciated backside, numb with pressure from sitting on the chair for too long?

  I have surprised myself that I am not more angry about what happened in Riyadh. I mean, just how pointless and senseless was this stupid attack? It was utterly cowardly too, picking on two defenceless, unarmed noncombatants who had taken the time and trouble to come and see the situation in Saudi Arabia for themselves and try to explain it to a global audience – not some government-sanitized, state-censored version, but the views of ordinary people, including their many grievances against the West and their own governments. That my reward for this should be several bullets in the guts and a lifetime of paraplegia is of course immensely unfair. But what’s done is done. Tempting as it is to think, ‘If only we had not gone,’ ‘If only we had left a day earlier,’ ‘If only I could have talked the gunmen out of those last four bullets that did me the real damage,’ I know such speculation is pointless.

  But in July 2005 the whole of London was to witness the horror of Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism. Both MI5 and SO13, Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, were aware that Britain was a prime target for fanatical Islamists, but having a
lready intercepted a number of plots they knew of no specific terror cell with both the capability and the intent to mount an imminent attack on mainland Britain. With both those criteria unfulfilled, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre had lowered the secret national-threat assessment from Severe General to Substantial in June. There was still a threat, but nobody knew which direction it was coming from.

  By 7 July 2005 I had been back at work for nearly three months and was feeling stronger. I was also starting to put the horrors of the previous year behind me. In the relatively quiet months of early summer I had revived many of my old contacts and forged some new ones. Now I was off to Germany, where I was giving a lecture, and taking my family with me for a short holiday. We loaded the suitcases into the taxi, collected Sasha from her ballet exam and headed west for Heathrow. But something was wrong.

  The traffic was worse than usual and there was talk on the radio about a power surge on the London Underground; curiously, my mobile could not get a signal from inside the taxi. While Melissa and Sasha chattered excitedly about the open-air swimming pool we would be going to in Germany, I asked the cab-driver to turn up the radio. It seemed there had been two incidents on the London Undergound and there was talk of explosions. Amanda and I exchanged glances: this did not sound good. One explosion could have been an accident, two sounded like a terrorist attack. I tried again to phone the BBC newsdesk but could not get a signal, since of course most of the capital was on the phone. The reports on the radio were now confirming there had been bomb explosions with several people killed; there was nothing for it but to divert to the BBC studios. Our holiday was over before it had begun. Sasha’s little face began to crumple with tears. ‘Does that mean we’re not going to Germany at all?’ she sobbed.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Amanda. ‘Daddy has to go to work now.’

  I sent the family back home in the taxi and we agreed they would stay indoors for the rest of the day, while I raced as fast as my wheelchair could carry me up to the live on-air studios.

  Although the casualties were a fraction of those in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, I still had that same nervous feeling throughout the day, uncertain whether the attack was over or whether this was just stage one of an elaborate plan. I remembered Al-Qaeda’s fondness for simultaneous strikes causing maximum human casualties. But when the day passed with no further attacks I suspected the worst was over, for the time being.

  Despite what had happened to me in Riyadh the previous year, I felt strangely detached from the carnage in central London. It brought back no memories, for my attack had been an intensely personal one where my assailants had effectively singled us out for ‘execution’, targeting only us and not our Saudi minders. But of course the intent was the same: to murder Western civilians in cold blood.

  Even before Al-Qaeda released the posthumous video testimony of Mohammed Siddique Khan, the presumed leader of the July London bombers, there were indications that this attack was inspired by, if not actually sanctioned by, Al-Qaeda and its anti-Western worldview. Firstly, the targets: choosing to hit a ‘soft’ Western transit hub at rush hour with the maximum chance of high casualties was almost an exact repeat of the Madrid bombings of the previous year. Al-Qaeda has always had a fascination with targeting Western transport systems, and its planners have long ago figured out that setting off bombs in dark tunnels hundreds of feet below ground would add a particular dimension of horror to any attack. (The UK government also expected such an attack, which is why the emergency services practised reacting to a mock chemical-bomb attack on Bank Tube station in September 2003.) Secondly, the modus operandi: Al-Qaeda saw the effectiveness of Lebanese Shi’ite suicide bombers in the early 1980s and copied it for themselves. This was pure asymmetric warfare, pitting a single man driving a truckful of explosives against an enemy he could not hope to defeat on the battlefield, yet who now suffered over 240 deaths in the case of the attack on the US Marines’ barracks at Beirut airport in 1983. In London, Anti-Terrorist Branch detectives quickly worked out from the forensic evidence that the July bombers had blown themselves up. Then there was the simultaneous, coordinated nature of the attacks, again a habit of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, as evidenced in New York, Madrid, Bali and several other locations. There was also no warning and no immediate claim of responsibility, just to keep the investigators guessing.

  In the days and weeks that followed the London bombings, I went into overdrive at work. Two things made a particularly strong impression on me: the reaction of the Arab world, and the testimony of the survivors I interviewed as they tried to cope with what had happened to them.

  Inevitably some pro-jihadi websites hailed the attacks as just retribution for Britain’s policies in Iraq and elsewhere, just as they claimed that Hurricane Katrina was divine punishment from God on America. Some media commentary condemned the attacks but declared them inevitable since Britain had invaded and occupied a sovereign Arab country on a fabricated pretext. But the overwhelming reaction was one of shock and sympathy for the British people, more so than for almost any other country attacked that I can think of. Arab journalists pointed out to their readers that millions in Britain had opposed the war in Iraq and still did; a Saudi correspondent told his paper that the streets of London were not what you would imagine – they were totally cosmopolitan, he said, full of every colour and creed, so an attack on London was like an attack on the world. Whatever Arabs think of British government policy, and it is rarely complimentary, most of them retain a great affection for London, a place which many view as their second home. They love its freedom of expression, its lively press, its open, grassy parks so popular with Gulf families in the summer. And young, holidaying Arabs love the shops, cafés and amusement arcades of Bayswater and the West End. America used to be a favoured destination, especially for Saudis who used to fly direct from Jeddah to Orlando, but 9/11 has changed that and many Gulf Arabs no longer feel welcome there. So the principal Arab reaction to the July bombings was one of outrage, potentially a hugely significant factor if the West is ever to come close to defeating Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism. Sadly, that sympathy began to wane almost immediately as the death toll in Iraq continued to mount, and the widely held perception that the War on Terror is a war against Muslims still carried currency in so much of the Middle East.

  So will Britain be attacked again or was this a ‘one-shot punishment’ for perceived misdemeanours? Almost certainly there will be plans afoot to stage further attacks on British interests – there were three thwarted plots in the months immediately after July 2005. Even if British troops withdrew immediately and totally from Iraq and Afghanistan and there was to be some miraculous solution to the Palestinian–Israeli dispute, there will probably always be a hard core of fanatics determined to strike at a country they see as hostile to their beliefs. The secret to defeating them in the long term rests partly, I believe, in winning over the middle ground of mainstream Muslim opinion, both in Britain and around the world. That will not be achieved by clever words of persuasion, instead it will take actual deeds on the ground: genuine progress towards a viable Palestinian state (‘Britain helped create the problem so Britain must help solve it’ is a widely held view), the eventual withdrawal of all British and Western forces from Muslim countries (Iraq is the sorest point here, but the situation is more complex in Afghanistan where Al-Qaeda and the Taliban can hardly wait for them to leave so they can re-establish themselves), and concrete steps towards making British Muslims feel their voices and concerns are not simply being ignored.

  The second, lasting impression came from a radio documentary I made for Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme on the wounded and traumatized survivors of the July bombings. The editor had rightly guessed that the victims would feel some empathy with me, as a fellow victim of terrorism; in fact the feeling was mutual. Often I would find myself talking quietly to survivors long after I had put down the microphone. Their descriptions of what it was like down in those darkened, smoke
-filled Tube carriages in the minutes after the explosions were haunting and terrifying. An Australian girl, Gill Hicks, told me how her legs had become bloody, truncated stumps yet she clung to consciousness and hung on for help. I recognized that same survival instinct I remembered kicking in for me in Riyadh, but after that we differed. A brave and magnanimous person, she told me she felt only pity for the bombers who had robbed her of her legs; for my part, I could never forgive the people who had robbed me of mine and murdered my cameraman. They had a free choice and they chose to do what they did.

  Working hard helped to take my mind off my own physical state, but some months after I left Stanmore hospital I had a call from a fellow patient. Simon H. had gone home at around the same time as I had and now he wanted to meet up. We got together in a café in west London, two paraplegics sitting there gossiping over coffees in our wheelchairs. He seemed robust and was as powerfully built as ever, in fact he was thinking of applying to go on the next Beyond Boundaries, a BBC2 reality endurance programme that took parties of disabled people across difficult terrain in places like Nicaragua. He was also showing his hospital sketches to someone who thought they could be published. We made it a regular thing, meeting up every other Friday, but then one day Simon H. phoned me in distress. Did I know, he asked, if doctors could legally have him ‘sectioned’ (restrained under observation for his own safety and that of others)? I asked him why. It turned out that he had deliberately swallowed a large amount of painkillers and had woken up in hospital. It was his second suicide attempt.

  Simon H. managed to avoid being sectioned, but I begged him not to try anything like that again. He was clearly finding his new life as a paraplegic extremely tough; he sounded surprised that I was not taking any antidepressants. The next time we met he was in obvious physical pain, wincing and gripping his legs as spasms of nerve pain racked his body, a sensation I know only too well. He mimicked putting a gun to his head and grimaced.