Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Faris, stroking his close-cropped beard. ‘I myself kidnapped some tourists last year. I think they were Belgian – or were they Italian? I forget. The government promised us a new road and some money so I released the tourists. But . . .’ he sighed and picked up an orange, turning it in his hand ‘. . . the government never delivered on its promise and so now I am looking to kidnap again.’ Faris looked up with a grin like the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood and added, ‘In fact I would happily kidnap you now, only I see you are well protected!’ Only then did I notice that our two guides/protectors had manoeuvred themselves ever so subtly into positions where they had a clear field of fire towards Faris while avoiding Lubna and me. Their fingers rested lightly on their Kalashnikovs and their faces betrayed no emotion. This, I thought, must be daily fare for the people who live out here.

  We parted with smiles and drove quickly back to the main Aden–Sana’a road, passing fields of qat bushes on the way. It was typical of Yemeni hospitality that our guides would accept no payment other than for the petrol. We stopped at a roadside café to make a call to Sana’a, and learned that after seventeen days in captivity the Mitchell family had been released unharmed and were on their way back by helicopter. We raced back to the capital, arriving just in time for me to film their convoy of cars sweeping through the gates of the British ambassador’s residence after dark. Exhausted as they must have been, they were kind enough to give me and Channel 4 an impromptu interview. I passed the footage I had shot to a woman from the Consulate who was accompanying the Mitchells back home on the morning flight. We celebrated that night in the embassy bar, downing steak, chips and lager behind the high walls of the compound. The next day I had the pleasure of sitting back in my hotel room and watching my footage go out at the top of each hour on BBC World.

  The next kidnapping in Yemen was to be a very different affair. In December 1998 a party of nineteen Western tourists, mostly from Britain, set off on a package-holiday tour of Yemen, run by the company Explore Worldwide. They were cultural tourists, mainly middle-aged men and women who were prepared to pay good money – £1,300 a head – for a well-organized fifteen-day excursion round remote sites in an unusual destination. But what should have been the holiday of a lifetime turned into a truly terrifying ordeal. Yemen is not a rich country and outside the main cities the roads are often dirt tracks navigable only by sturdy four-wheel-drive jeeps. So the Explore party left Sana’a in a convoy of five four-wheel-drive jeeps driven by men who knew the country well. They visited the pre-Islamic Sabaean temple of Mar’ib, where legend has it that King Solomon met the Queen of Sheba, then headed south towards Aden. Along the way, the convoy passed through a wild and lonely corner of the province of Abyan and it was there that their ambushers lay in wait.

  At around eleven o’clock on the morning of 28 December, as the convoy of tourists descended a gentle dip in the road, the driver of the lead jeep saw several vehicles stopped up ahead. The next thing he and his passengers heard was shots ringing out over their heads. They were being ordered to stop by a group of around twenty men armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades; the kidnappers had blocked the convoy and were now forcing it off the road and into the mountains. Once again, Western tourists were being kidnapped in Yemen. But this time was different. The kidnappers were not hospitable tribesmen with an economic grudge against the government. They were Islamist rebels, part of a banned organization calling itself the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, and unlike most Yemenis they had a violent hatred of Westerners.

  The leader of the organization was also running the kidnap. He was a small, wiry man called Abu’l Hassan Al-Mihdar. (Three years later a distant relative of his became one of the nineteen suicide hijackers who flew planes at US cities on 11 September 2001.) Al-Mihdar and his men forced the tourists off the road and drove them deep into the black, volcanic landscape, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the road, from where government troops would surely come looking for them. In fact the lead vehicle in the tourists’ convoy, containing the Explore guide and two tourists, had managed to break away and they raised the alarm in Aden. As the kidnapped tourists spent their first night in captivity, eating a meagre meal beneath the stars, the lead kidnapper, Al-Mihdar, phoned Abu Hamza, the imam of Finsbury Park Mosque in London, to say that he had ‘captured some infidels’ and he needed to discuss what to do with them. They had no idea that every word of their conversation was being recorded by GCHQ, the British government’s secret listening station.

  Since most of the captives were British, the Ambassador, Vic Henderson, went to see the notoriously hardline Yemeni Interior Minister, Mohammed Al Arab, in Sana’a to reemphasize the Foreign Office’s request that the situation be resolved peacefully, by negotiation, and not by a shoot-out. The safety of the hostages had to come first. ‘Ah,’ said the Interior Minister. ‘Well, in fact I have some news for you. There has been some shooting and there have been some casualties.’

  It was a bloodbath. Once the Yemeni security forces had located the terrorists’ hideout they became convinced that the hostages were about to be executed, so they went in guns blazing. Accounts differ over who fired first. Yemen says the terrorists started the gun battle, but the hostages later told me it was their ‘rescuers’, the Yemeni army. The net result was that out of sixteen Western tourists, four were killed, while another, an American woman, was shot in the thigh, according to the hospital in Aden. A policeman and two of the kidnappers were also killed and the remainder arrested, including their ringleader, Al-Mihdar.

  While the survivors were being flown westwards by helicopter to Aden I was touching down in the same city on a flight from Dubai, dispatched there once again by the BBC’s tireless Malcolm Downing, the Foreign Assignments Editor, although since I was a humble stringer I was still on my own without producer or BBC camera crew.

  Driving into Aden past the old Russian apartment blocks, I braced myself for one of the hardest assignments of my career. I now had to interview the British survivors of this ordeal, some of whom had lost loved ones, and play the interview back to London over the phone in time to make the six o’clock news. How would they react? What if the last thing they wanted right now was to talk to some reporter? As I walked into the lobby of the Aden Movenpick hotel I had my answer. The survivors were huddled in a corner of the adjacent bar, nursing beers and strong drinks, giving me wary looks. One of them even told me to go away. I could hardly blame them, but what I did not know was that earlier that afternoon a TV crew from Lebanon had gone round shoving a camera in their faces and saying they were from the BBC. I was starting from a disadvantage here. Just then a well-built man in their group spoke up. ‘I’ll talk to you,’ he said. ‘I want people to know what happened to me and my wife.’

  Lawrence Whitehouse was a schoolteacher from Hampshire. He and his wife Margaret had come on this trip to see something of another culture, to broaden their horizons. They had left the Christmas tree and the presents at home and flown to Yemen with Explore Worldwide. Everything had been going well, he said as we sat in a dark corner of the bar, speaking into my digital minidisk, and they had been looking forward to visiting more of this historically rich country. But then of course it had turned into an ordeal. Their kidnappers were horrible, horrible men, he said, who showed no interest in talking to their captives. One of the tourists had brought with him an English translation of the Koran in an attempt to learn more about Islam, but Al-Mihdar had refused to enter into a discussion with him, treating him and his fellow captives as infidels worthy of contempt. When the botched rescue attempt began, Lawrence Whitehouse said the terrorist guarding him and his wife had tried to use them as human shields. Margaret had been hit by gunfire. Outnumbered, the terrorists tried to escape, but by then it was too late for Margaret. She had died in Lawrence’s arms.

  At that moment there was a commotion in the lobby: the tour group’s suitcases had arrived and were being unloaded. ‘That’s my wife�
�s suitcase,’ said Lawrence, who knew he would be returning home to an empty house and all those unwrapped Christmas presents.

  That night, upstairs in the privacy of my hotel room, I cried and cried. I did not usually allow myself to get emotionally involved in the stories I was covering but I think everyone has their breaking point. Why would anyone want to hurt innocent cultural tourists this way? I asked myself. It was my first brush with Islamist terrorism and an introduction to the sheer ruthlessness of those who commit murder in God’s name.

  The Yemeni authorities wanted the freed hostages to stay and give detailed statements, but the British Consul-General, David Pearce, worked tirelessly to get them repatriated as fast as possible. I flew with the survivors up to Sana’a, where I spent the last night of 1998 on the phone in my hotel room doing ‘two-ways’, down-the-line interviews for various BBC programmes, though I did wonder who would be listening at that time of year. Marooned in the Yemeni capital on New Year’s Day, I spent the morning in the old town listening to Yemenis wringing their hands in apology over what had happened. They were appalled at what their fellow countrymen had done to these tourists, they said. It had brought ’ayb, shame, upon their country.

  Meanwhile, David Pearce had been negotiating to get the bodies of the dead Britons flown back to Britain, but the Yemeni authorities would only agree to release them if an autopsy was carried out on their soil, the bullets were all extracted and if he was present to watch. Pearce described it as the most gruesome moment of his diplomatic career. ‘I had to go to the mortuary, where I was surrounded by dead bodies,’ he told me. ‘There were about fourteen corpses in all. Some of them had been there for ages and were all intertwined, with leathery skin, but one was of a recently killed Yemeni man who was missing half his head and whose eyes were staring out at me. There was this horrible smell. When the doctor strolled in, dressed in a futa and open shirt, he used a coat hanger and his bare hands – no gloves – to remove the bullets. Some of the bullet tracks ran upwards through the bodies, implying that at least some had been fired by the terrorists as they cowered on the ground, shooting upwards at their hostages who they were using as human shields. But other bullets had hit from other directions, suggesting they could have been fired by the advancing Yemeni security forces. After this,’ said Pearce, ‘I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder when I returned to the UK.’

  But there turned out to be yet another twist to this tale. Unknown to the Foreign Office, the police in Aden had arrested several British Muslims of Asian origin and two Algerians a few days earlier on suspicion of terrorism. Several other wanted men, including three Britons, were said to be on the run in the wilds of Abyan province. Yemen claimed that the arrested men had been caught red-handed with explosives and firearms, plotting to blow up three Western targets in Aden. According to the authorities, these targets included the British Consulate (where David Pearce was staying with his family), the Anglican church and the Aden Movenpick hotel, where I was now staying. The men insisted they were tourists, not terrorists, despite the police’s discovery of jihadi videos showing four of them holding automatic weapons in Albania the previous year. The Yemen authorities said they had arrested them after they crashed a police checkpoint at midnight on 23 December with weapons and explosives in the boot of their car, and following police raids on two hotels and a villa. The Yemeni government went further, asserting that these mostly British Muslims had been sent to Yemen to wage violent jihad by a man named Abu Hamza Al-Masri, the now infamous hook-handed imam of Finsbury Park mosque in north London, and that Al-Mihdar and his group had carried out the kidnapping to put pressure on the Yemeni government to release the British Muslims.

  Back in London, Abu Hamza Al-Masri did not deny that he had been in contact by satellite phone with the lead kidnapper, Al-Mihdar. Nor did he deny that one of those on the run from the Yemeni authorities was his son, Mohammed Kamel, and another his stepson, Mohsen Ghailan, but he dismissed having anything to do with terrorism. The Finsbury Park imam did, however, issue a communiqué on 30 December on behalf of Al-Mihdar’s Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, and his organization The Supporters of Shari’ah had advertised what it called ‘military training for brothers’, featuring a picture of a hand grenade. Three weeks later Abu Hamza held a press conference in London warning all Westerners to leave Yemen and calling for the overthrow of the Yemeni government. Doubtless he would have thought twice about doing all this in the more draconian atmosphere of Britain after the London bombings of July 2005, but by then he was in Belmarsh prison awaiting trial and extradition to the US.

  Britain’s multi-cultural society was no doubt an alien concept to the jailers of Aden Central Police Station in December 1998. Yes, the men they had in custody claimed they were British, but they looked like Pakistanis so surely they were Pakistanis. At first, the local police chief, General Muhammad Turaik, insisted his captives were carrying forged British passports and he asked the British embassy to check them out. A few urgent calls to London established that they were British and it suddenly became a huge story. In London journalists swarmed round Finsbury Park mosque, where Abu Hamza Al-Masri started to become a media personality.

  I was immediately ordered back to Aden from Dubai, but since there were no connecting flights that day I had to disembark in Sana’a at dawn then hire a taxi for the scenic but nerve-racking six-hour drive across the country to Aden. It had been less than a year since the Mitchell family had been kidnapped on this road and less than a month since the murderous kidnapping of the tourists, so I spent an uneasy journey, hunkered down in the back seat with my Arab shemagh headscarf concealing my face in the hope that anyone looking in would assume I was a Yemeni passenger. My one consolation was the sight of some exotic Rift Valley birds in the south: hornbills and hamerkops that lived here, close to the Red Sea and the coast of Africa.

  There was no media access to the Britons in Aden, but through diplomats and their lawyers we learned that the men claimed to have been mistreated in prison and were protesting their innocence. The British government was now in an awkward position. If the Yemeni government’s accusations were true then here were several dangerous British terrorists, bent on killing Westerners in Yemen, dispatched on their mission by a London imam. But according to British detectives sent by the Anti-Terrorist Branch, the Yemeni authorities had made almost every mistake in the book. They said no forensic or fibre analysis had been done at the scene of arrest, the men had been physically abused in custody, and the prosecution’s case seemed to rest largely on confessions made under duress. In other words, whatever the men had or had not been doing in Yemen, this case would not have stood up in a British court of law. There was a brief outcry about this in Britain, but the trial went ahead and in August 1999 a panel of three judges in Aden convicted the men, including Abu Hamza Al-Masri’s son-in-law Mohammed Kamel, of participation in acts of terrorism. Kamel was sentenced to three years in prison, Ghailan to seven years, while the others also got varying jail terms.

  As for the lead kidnapper, Abu’l Hassan Al-Mihdar, he was completely unrepentant. On 13 January 1999 I attended his first appearance in court in the exotically named fishing port of Zinjibar, down on Yemen’s steamy Indian Ocean coast. Guarded by nervous soldiers manning heavy machine guns mounted on pick-up trucks, he emerged in handcuffs and a clean shirt from a windowless police van. I called out to him in Arabic to ask if he considered himself innocent or guilty – a dumb question, I know, but it would add a little colour to my next radio broadcast. He replied that only God could judge him.

  Inside the courthouse he was charged with kidnapping, highway robbery, premeditated murder, sabotage and forming an armed group – the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army – but in fact he dominated proceedings, telling the rather timid judge that he should be ashamed of himself and that God had guided him on this righteous path to kidnapping. ‘God sent them to us,’ he shouted, referring to the Western tourists, ‘these sons of pigs and monkeys. We fought in Afghanistan and
Chechnya and we will continue the struggle until the establishment of an Islamic state in Yemen.’ But his prowess in court did not impress the Yemeni government. Al-Mihdar was sentenced to death and executed that October, along with three of his accomplices, while a fourth member of his gang was given a twenty-year jail sentence. Yemen continued to demand in vain the extradition from Britain of the Finsbury Park imam, Abu Hamza Al-Masri, even though there was no extradition treaty between the two countries. Fed up with the kidnappings that had given his country such a bad reputation, President Saleh decreed that from now on anyone committing armed kidnap would automatically be executed, without any negotiation. Kidnapping in Yemen dropped off dramatically: between 1996 and 1999 a total of 140 foreigners had been seized, an average of thirty-five a year, but by 2000 that annual figure dropped to just eight. At the peak of the phenomenon in 1997 a total of forty-three foreign tourists were kidnapped; in 2001 just two were taken and then released.

  All this may have been taking place on the same Arabian Peninsula as Dubai, but it was a world away from our cosy life in the villa. While I was away on these trips, Amanda was adapting quickly to life as an expat mother and had been getting to know our neighbours. There were Tim and Sian, both accountants from Surrey; Birgit, a timid German married to a devout Tunisian; and Marco, an Italian newly married to a taciturn German girl. Marco told us proudly about his fantastic banking salary, his bright-red Mercedes sat gleaming outside their villa and their dining table was always set perfectly for guests. Then one day, seemingly without warning, his wife left him and he was devastated.