Saad was unable to use the William Hill money to bribe corrupt officials to release my family, but he was able to buy their way in to the course. And so, after suffering the inhuman indignities of that place for longer than anyone deserved, they were set free. But as ever, we did not know how long it would be before someone came for them once more. Their situation hadn’t changed: someone still had to try to get them out of the country.
My finances were at rock bottom. So were Rachel’s. Aside from what I had sent to Saad, I still had a tiny amount of the William Hill money, but not nearly enough to pay smugglers to get all three of them over to the UK, and I knew now that I couldn’t risk trying to arrange things myself. This had to be done by the professionals, as and when I managed to earn the money. My mother, brother, and sister would have to come out one by one. With what was left of the money, and by scrimping and saving, I managed to put together enough for the first attempt, and in April 2001, about three months after my return from Germany, it was decided that my sister would leave first.
While the secret and illicit arrangements were being made, I could concentrate on nothing else. The sense of apprehension I felt could not have been more intense had I been the one who was making the escape attempt, but I had to try to keep things as normal as possible; otherwise I would have gone mad. I still had my Saturday job at a big department store in Leeds—I needed the money now more than ever, after all—and one Saturday I was going about my business in the store when, across the floor, I saw a face I recognized. It was my former boss from William Hill. He was gazing around the department as though looking for something, or someone, so I put my head down and tried to remain inconspicuous in an attempt to shake off the cloak of paranoia that had suddenly descended on me. Before long, however, I heard a voice behind me that made me start.
“Lewis!”
I slowly turned to confront him, fully prepared for what I thought was about to happen. But when I looked at him, I was surprised. There was a big, friendly smile on his face—he seemed genuinely happy to see me. “When you left,” he boomed, “we had to employ an army of number-crunchers to do your work for you!” I smiled awkwardly. We chatted for a few minutes and then he left, clearly unaware of what I had been up to. For myself, I felt a surge of relief: it looked as if I had some more time.
Saad made arrangements for the first leg of my sister’s escape from Baghdad. He found another Kurdish smuggler and arranged a price for delivery out of Iraq. Marwa took the same route as last time, through northern Iraq and into Kurdistan and then Turkey. From there, I arranged with somebody in the UK for her to travel in the back of a truck to Dover, where she crossed over using an Austrian refugee’s travel document, probably sold to smugglers by the original owner. It was a slow business—probably more painfully slow for those of us waiting to hear good news than it was for her, distracted as she was by her nerves and her fear. To be deported back to Iraq once was bad enough; she couldn’t risk things going wrong again.
She succeeded. The thrill of excitement I felt when I took the call to say she needed me to receive her at UK immigration was more wonderful than I can express. I rushed down there and took her in my arms, holding her for what seemed like hours in an embrace that I didn’t want to end. The last time I had seen her had been in the airport in Kuala Lumpur. Then she had the haunted expression of a person who had had all the fight sucked out of her, who was resigned to the fact that she was going to meet an unknown and unwanted fate. Now that she had claimed asylum, however, all that fell from her. I remember thinking what a remarkable effect freedom has on people.
More to the point, we had now established that the route my sister had taken actually worked. All that remained was to raise the money to pay smugglers to get my brother and mother out, because their joy at knowing that my sister was safe was tempered by the constant fear of a knock at the door. But we were nearly there. I could almost taste the success, and in my mind I constantly replayed our imagined, joyous reunion on British soil.
Safe.
It was so close.
Not long after my sister arrived, I was out walking and I bumped into another familiar face: the recruitment consultant who had found me the job at William Hill. Something about the way he looked at me as he approached made me feel uncomfortable, but it would have been rude to turn away when I had so obviously noticed him. Besides, it was probably just my paranoia talking.
“Lewis,” he nodded knowingly at me, “how are you doing?”
“Okay,” I replied, not wanting to have to explain all my troubles in the street.
“So tell me, what have you been up to?”
I shrugged. “The usual.” Something told me that I wanted this conversation to finish as quickly as possible.
“You know, it’s a real coincidence,” he continued persistently. “Someone came to the office yesterday asking about you.”
I fell silent.
“He said he was an investigator.”
I smiled nervously. “Don’t be silly.” I tried to laugh it off. “What would an investigator want with me? It’s not like I get up to much worth investigating.”
“Maybe not,” he said thoughtfully. “But be careful, Lewis,” he warned before going on his way. “He looked like he meant business.”
I ran all the way back home. I had expected this, of course, but that didn’t stop it coming as a shock to learn that someone was on my trail. I couldn’t be put away now, not with my family still stuck in Baghdad. In a state of paranoia I shut myself in a room and reformatted the hard drive of my laptop computer. I don’t know what I thought anyone would find there, but it comforted me somewhat to feel as if I was doing something to cover my tracks.
And then everything went quiet. Ostensibly Rachel and I went about our daily lives, but I felt as though a sword was hanging over me by a thread. As often as I could I tried to speak to Saad and, in our roundabout, coded way, give him the message that I so desperately had to impart: time is slipping away. We have to get them out, and soon.
One Saturday two or three months later I received a phone call while on duty at the store. It was security.
“Lewis,” one of the security guards greeted me amicably, “could you pop down to see us for a minute?”
“Sure,” I replied. I assumed I had forgotten to remove a security tag from an item of clothing and someone had complained—it was easily done—so I sauntered down to the security offices. The door was opened by a large female security officer of whom I had always been rather wary but who on this occasion seemed to be almost oversolicitous.
“Come in, Lewis.” She smiled at me.
I walked in to find two men in suits. One of them was fairly nondescript; the other was enormous—six foot three with broad shoulders and a thick black and white goatee. Each man stood in one corner of the room. The big man looked at me.
“Are you Lewis Alsamari?” he asked without formality.
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Please take a seat.” He gestured at a chair in front of him, and I sat down.
“Did you work at a company called William Hill, Lewis?”
As soon as he asked the question, I knew that all the horrible suspicions that had been flitting through my brain in the last thirty seconds were about to be confirmed.
“Yes,” I replied.
He nodded calmly. “Lewis Alsamari,” he recited. “I’m arresting you on charges of conspiracy to defraud. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you may later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
Nobody spoke. I did my best not to let the emotion show on my face as I tried to think clearly. What should I do? Admit everything? That had always been my plan when I had assumed that my family would all be safely in the UK. But I didn’t know what they would do to me if I confessed now, and I had to make sure I was around to help my family in what I hoped would be their final attempt to leave. So should I deny
everything? Or should I keep my own counsel and not say anything for the moment?
I chose the latter course of action.
The large man broke the silence. “We’re going to take you away now, Lewis,” he said firmly but not unkindly. I was led to my locker, which I opened; my wallet and keys were removed and placed into an evidence bag.
“Now then, Lewis,” I was told, “we have a choice. I can handcuff you now and lead you out of the store. I don’t want to do that, so I’m going to trust you not to run away. But the two of us will be walking very close to you on either side, so no funny business. Understood?”
I nodded, strangely humbled by the faith they had in me. If and when the authorities came knocking for my mother and brother, I knew they would not be afforded the same respect. “Thank you,” I said.
Flanked by the two men, I was escorted to the staff entrance of the store, then out into the adjacent shopping arcade. I can’t say there were no thoughts of escape in my mind, but I knew how foolish it would be to abuse the trust that had been put in me, so I came quietly. We walked out into the street and toward their car. I was placed in the back while the two Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers sat in the front.
“Where’s your car, Lewis?” I was asked.
I didn’t answer for a moment; instead I bowed my head sheepishly. “It’s over there.” I pointed to a big building on the other side of the road.
The two men looked at each other. “What do you mean, it’s over there? That’s the police station.”
I nodded. I had cheekily been parking there in order to save money. The reasons were too complicated to explain there and then, and I didn’t blame them for sharing a look that indicated their incredulity at my chutzpah. If only they knew the truth, I thought to myself. If only they knew that getting into trouble for parking my car in a West Yorkshire police lot was the least of my worries! They searched my car—a Nissan Sunny worth about £200—thoroughly, then took me to a smaller police station for processing. Not for the first time in my life, I was placed in a cell. To my astonishment, as I was escorted in, the duty officer said, “I’m sorry about the conditions.” For a moment I thought it was a sick joke, but one look on his face showed me that he meant it. And if he thought I would find the conditions unpleasant, he could not have been more wrong. There was a bed with a mattress, a steel water fountain, and a moderately clean toilet. Compared to some of the cells in which my family and I had found ourselves, this was positively luxurious.
While I was in the cell, Rachel heard a knock on the door of our house. She was having coffee with a friend and excused herself to go and open the door. It was CID. The officers explained what was going on and asked to search the house. Rachel had no option: she let them in. The officers collected all my documents and my laptop computer and took them away.
Four or five hours later I was removed from the cell and taken to an interview room.
“I’m not going to charge you,” the CID officer said. “I’m going to release you on bail. I’ve taken all your stuff, and you need to come and report to the police station on a regular basis so we know you’re still around. But I’m going to interview you now, and you have the right to a lawyer. Do you want one?”
“Yes,” I nodded.
A lawyer arrived, and I was placed in his hands. He was pleasant and friendly, and I wanted to trust him, to feel comfortable with his advice, but I found it difficult. After everything I had been through, the truth was that I trusted nobody except Rachel. I certainly didn’t trust any persons in authority, no matter whether they were Iraqi, Malaysian, or English. All sorts of possibilities ran through my head: that this man might be working with the police, that they might be trying to get me to incriminate myself. I didn’t realize that that wasn’t the way things are done in England. All the trust I might have afforded the lawyer had been sucked out of me, but I did my best to pay attention when he explained that I had the right to remain silent or to say “No comment” to any question but warned that doing so could affect me in the future.
When the interview started, I faced a barrage of questions. I admitted nothing.
I knew I wouldn’t fool anyone, but the more I thought about it the more I realized I had to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible. I would be no use to my family in jail. When the interview finished, the CID officer said, “Right, Lewis, I’m going to be investigating this further. I’ll be in touch through your lawyers.”
And I was allowed to go free. For the time being.
Suddenly, the pressure had doubled. I wasn’t afraid of going to prison, but I was terrified of doing so before I could complete the job of getting my family out of Iraq. I knew that it was only a matter of time before I found myself in court; and when that happened, I would not be able to keep up the pretense of my denial anymore. But I simply didn’t have the money to pay anybody to smuggle my mother and brother all the way to the UK. There was no way I could risk them being in Baghdad while I was in jail, however. So in conjunction with Saad, I arranged for them to flee.
They departed under cover of night, leaving the little house in Al-Mansour that had been their home for so long. They traveled north to Mosul and remained there for a while, not exactly safe, but unknown to the authorities in that town and farther removed at least from the risk of being dragged back into Abu Ghraib. I sent them what money I could to subsist. And while the case against me was being established in England, Saad and I carried on, working hard to arrange for them to be sent farther north, into Kurdistan and eventually Turkey. The situation was far from ideal—I wouldn’t be able to rest easy until they were by my side—but it was a start.
Finally the day came, as I knew it must, on which I was charged. A trial date was set. My lawyer told me I had two options: to plead not guilty and deny all the charges or to plead guilty and claim mitigating circumstances. I asked what the worst punishment I could expect to receive was if I pleaded guilty. Two years in prison, I was told, and a deportation order. The prison sentence I could endure; the deportation could spell death to me, but it was a risk I was going to have to run: I had never intended to deny what I had done, and denial would have been pointless in any case. The evidence was all there. I had to hope that I would receive more lenient treatment from my judge than my family had received from theirs in Iraq.
I gathered together as much evidence as I could—receipts from the fine I had to pay in Malaysia and the like—to show where the William Hill money had gone. I wanted to show that I had not squandered the £37,000 on revelry but rather had used it to save the people I loved from torture and worse. I made a statement and so did my sister. I dug out records of telephone calls to Iraq and to shady people-smugglers. I even made a plea to William Hill that I would repay the money—I didn’t know how I would be able to, but perhaps I would find a way. I amassed all the mitigating evidence I could put my hands on, but in the end I knew it would come down to the sympathy of one man: the judge who was trying my case. He would decide my fate, and as my family was still relying on me, he would also decide the fate of those two faceless refugees so many miles away.
When my trial date was set, it seemed a long way off, but it arrived with inexorable speed. The lawyers for the prosecution and the representative from William Hill avoided my eye as, three years after my return from Malaysia, I took my place in the dock and waited for these men to argue the rights and wrongs of what I had done. When the lawyers for the prosecution made their case, I felt like screaming at them. “What would you have done?” I wanted to ask them. “Picture your own mother being beaten for no crime greater than trying to live her life quietly. What would you have done?” But I kept quiet and hoped that my story would speak for itself.
The judge was inscrutable as he listened to the case. I spent my time examining his face, looking for any sign of shock or sympathy, but I could see none. He simply listened, impassively, directing the court and asking the occasional question but otherwise showing no emotion whatsoever.
Silently I begged him to give me some sign, some indication of how he was going to deal with me, but he was aloof and professional. I would have to wait until the verdict.
When the time came, the court fell silent. “Stand up, Mr. Alsamari,” the judge intoned.
I did as I was told. And then he started his summing-up. He recited the charges in such a way as to make them sound premeditated in the extreme: “You stole or adapted to your own use the sums of, in total, £37,000 from your employers by effectively falsifying records by access to what was thought to be a secure system on the computer. You pleaded guilty, but on a basis which is wholly exceptional, and which is set out at length by your learned counsel in mitigation, and I need not repeat it.”
I bowed my head as I listened. He did not sound remotely impressed.
“I have no doubt whatsoever,” the judge continued solemnly, “that it is a true story by virtue of the documents I have seen, and obviously from my own general knowledge.”
There was a pause before he continued. I glanced around the courtroom to see that everyone was looking at him with a rapt expression, hanging on every word he said.
“This offense for you is a tragedy. You have lost your good character, and you are an intelligent and hardworking individual who, apart from this incident, has an exemplary character.”
I held my breath.
“It is clearly an offense, involving, as it does, breach of trust, the danger that others would be blamed for what you had done, working in the same department, that justifies a custodial sentence. I am asked to draw back from that and pass upon you a community sentence because, aside from anything else, a custodial sentence, whether suspended or actual, will affect your citizenship application, and in one sense rightly so. I have listened very carefully to the mitigation on the basis of your plea, and given you credit for that plea, and I have read the many documents which have been referred to in court both from your family and from others. This is, in my experience, a unique mitigation. And I say this: that I cannot begin to imagine what it is like to have your family living within a regime which has no contemplation of human rights…and where the only way that you have to help the rest of your family escape is to bribe corrupt officials with money which you do not have. The knowledge that you had at that time, together with the depression you were suffering from—as I say, I cannot begin to imagine what that is like, and the dilemma that faces you.”
Escape from Saddam Page 26