Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Indeed, so aware were they of the horrors of the Rosser and Reynolds murders that the Court of Appeal took the exceptional step of suggesting that the details should not be made widely available. ‘The media, in reporting the decision of the Court,’ it suggested, ‘will, the Court knows, report the matter in such a way that the families of the two murdered children are not subjected to even greater anguish.’

  The deaths of four-year-old Riley Turner and seventeen-year-old Georgia Williams had taken enough toll on the two families without making their suffering even more acute by replaying the horrific details all over again, and yet the Court knew that it could not render its judgement without describing the grotesque treatment that they had both been subjected to.

  Sitting in Court Five of the Royal Courts of Justice that morning in October 2014, I felt once again that the legal system found itself caught in the paradox of insisting that the draconian term of a whole life in prison with little hope of release should be imposed while, at the same time, trying to protect the families – and, by implication, the general public – from the repeating the worst details that made that whole life order inevitable.

  The worst murderers may justify the harshest treatment, but the general public should be protected from knowing too many details out of respect for the victims’ families. That was not to prove possible in the next case to provoke a whole life term of imprisonment – for that was to be played out in full view of the television cameras and the onlookers’ mobile phones – and involve the massacre of an innocent soldier in broad daylight.

  3

  ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’

  Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale

  Few people in Britain will ever forget the sunny Wednesday afternoon of 22 May 2013 when, just after 2.20 pm, two young Muslin extremists, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, then aged just twenty-eight and twenty-one, hacked to death twenty-five-year-old Manchester-born drummer Lee Rigby from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in a quiet side street just yards from his base at Woolwich Barracks in south-east London.

  There were puffy clouds in the sky and a gentle breeze, but the barbarity of the killing in broad daylight – that left the young soldier almost beheaded – and his attackers proclaiming for every passer-by to see that they had killed in protest at the death of Muslims at the hands of British soldiers, left the nation stunned.

  A separated father of a two-year-old son, Rigby, who had served in Afghanistan, was making his way back to his barracks after spending the morning working as a recruiting soldier for the British Army at the Regimental Headquarters in the Tower of London. He had got off the train at the nearby Woolwich Arsenal station shortly after 2.10 pm and was walking down Wellington Street on his way back to the Royal Artillery Barracks.

  Lee Rigby was not in uniform, he was simply wearing a hooded T-shirt inscribed ‘Help for Heroes’, the charity for wounded soldiers.

  Unbeknown to Rigby his killers had decided, to advance their extremist cause, to murder a British soldier in broad daylight and to do so in such a brutal way as to attract the maximum of publicity to their cause. They hoped it would culminate in their being shot dead by armed police officers who would be bound to be called to the scene of such a public execution. Adebolajo and Adebowale expected to become martyrs and gain their place in paradise.

  In the days before their attack the two young men, both British born, though of Nigerian descent, had acquired an old handgun – a revolver – which did not work, but nevertheless looked sufficiently realistic to ensure that members of the public would not threaten them until the armed police they expected had arrived. The day before the attack they had also bought five knives and a knife sharpener, which they used to sharpen some of the knives before the attack.

  They met up in the morning of Lee Rigby’s murder, and eventually drove to Wellington Street, close to Woolwich Barracks, an area Adebolajo knew well, having lived there and handed out leaflets supporting the cause of Islamic jihad outside the Poundland store in the High Street. Adebolajo drove them to Wellington Street in a Vauxhall Tigra car, where the two young men waited for their utterly innocent victim. They were carrying the handgun and no fewer than eight knives.

  Adebolajo and Adebovale were both tall and slim, both London-born to Christian parents, both having converted to Islam some years before, and both were equally convinced of the justification for their murder, their own private jihad against a British soldier.

  Lee Rigby was to become their innocent victim. There was little doubt he was a soldier. He was wearing a ‘Help for Heroes’ hooded top and carrying his Army day sack. He was fresh-faced, outgoing, cheerful and energetic, the epitome of an excellent young British soldier. He had done nothing whatever to deserve what Adebolajo and Adebowale had in mind for him.

  The two young extremists watched Rigby as he walked down Wellington Street, crossed John Wilson Street, which formed part of London’s South Circular Road, and entered Artillery Place on the way to the barracks. Once he had passed the blue Vauxhall Tigra, Adebolajo, who was driving, started to follow him, and then – when he had his back to them – accelerated to between thirty and forty miles an hour and ran him down from behind.

  The impact threw Rigby on to the bonnet of the Vauxhall, breaking five vertebrae in his back and five ribs, and leaving him unconscious. With his body on the bonnet the car then careered across Artillery Place before mounting the pavement and crashing into the support of a road sign. The sudden stop meant that Rigby’s inert body was dumped in front of the car. There was no way that the unconscious soldier could defend himself against the barbaric attack that was to follow.

  Rigby’s two tall attackers jumped out of their car, Adebolajo carrying a knife and a meat cleaver, Adebowale carrying a knife and the handgun. In the next three minutes the two men butchered Rigby – there is no other word to describe it. Adebolajo concentrated on trying to decapitate him, hacking at his neck with the cleaver before switching to another knife, while Adebowale concentrated instead on his chest and torso, stabbing him in a frenzy with the most severe force.

  In broad daylight, with the sun filtering through the clouds, the two men rained blow after blow on the helpless Rigby until he was unrecognisable. It was a bloodbath, the most relentless, barbaric attack on an innocent young man that could ever be imagined. So bad were the young soldier’s injuries that he could only be formally identified later by using his dental records.

  Still not content, Adebolajo and Adebowale then dragged the now dead body of Rigby into the centre of Artillery Place and dumped it there – bringing the traffic to a halt and attracting – as they had planned – an ever-increasing group of passers-by. Some tried to see if there was anything at all they could do to help Rigby, while others engaged the two attackers in conversation.

  Adebolajo – bloody meat cleaver still clasped firmly in his hand – explained to one female passer-by: ‘The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers … By Allah, we swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting until you leave us alone.’

  Aware that he was being filmed on a mobile phone, Adebolajo launched into a political diatribe in defence of his and Adebowale’s actions that afternoon – as retaliation for the deaths in Muslim countries, and hoped that his statement would be broadcast around the world.

  ‘This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ he then added, before handing another passer-by a two-page note trying to justify their actions.

  As Mr Justice Swe
eney was to comment at the trial of both men for murder six months later: ‘Your sickening and pitiless conduct was in stark contrast to the compassion and bravery shown by the various women at the scene who tended to Lee Rigby’s body and who challenged what you had done and said.’

  At 2.34 on that May afternoon, thirteen minutes after the attack on Lee Rigby had begun in earnest, a group of armed police officers arrived at the site of the attack in Artillery Place. They immediately confronted the two Muslim extremists with their weapons drawn and shouted, ‘Armed Police … Put down your weapons!’ Both men refused to do so.

  Michael Adebolajo’s response was to run towards the police brandishing the meat cleaver above his head, having thrown away the knife, preparing to attack one or more of the armed officers. Michael Adebowale, meanwhile, crouched down and pointed the handgun at the officers, as if preparing to shoot. The police responded by firing eight times at close range, shooting them both. However, they immediately sought to offer first aid, even though Adebowale pointed the handgun at them again after he was shot the first time.

  The incident ended with both attackers being taken to hospital with gunshot wounds, while the body of Fusilier Lee Rigby was eventually removed to the mortuary.

  The killing provoked a political storm and a ferocious backlash among the British people. Within a few days, more than £600,000 had been donated to Help for Heroes and the emergency Cabinet committee, COBRA, had met twice in Downing Street, the first session chaired by the Home Secretary, the second by the Prime Minister. There were genuine, and persistent, fears that such a barbarous killing in broad daylight by two men with close connections to Islamic jihad would incite a fierce anti-Muslim reaction from the British public.

  In the days after Rigby’s killing an extra 200 uniformed police officers were put on patrol on the streets of London in an attempt to ensure there would be no backlash against Muslim communities in the capital; but right-wing groups, including the British National Party and the English Defence League, organised demonstrations condemning Rigby’s killing.

  The fears about a backlash proved fully justified. In the ten days after Rigby’s killing there was an eight-fold increase in anti-Muslim attacks across Britain. These ranged from ten attacks on mosques to physical abuse of Muslim women in the street and an attack on an Islamic Centre in Muswell Hill, north London, which was used by Muslim children after school. One charity estimated that there were more than 200 anti-Muslim attacks in London in the aftermath of Lee Rigby’s brutal murder.

  Once Adebolajo and Adebowale were released from their separate hospitals after treatment for their gunshot wounds, both attackers were formally charged with the murder of Rigby and the attempted murder of police officers, and then remanded in custody. That did not prove a pleasant experience. Adebolajo was reported to have lost two front teeth as a result of an attack at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, barely a mile from the scene of the attack.

  On 27 September 2013, Adebolajo and Adebowale appeared by video link at the Central Criminal Court in the Old Bailey in London and both pleaded not guilty to the murder of Lee Rigby – in spite of Adebolajo’s confession at the scene of the crime, which had been captured by a bystander on a mobile phone, and in spite of the considerable closed circuit television evidence showing them taking part.

  When their trial began just two months later, on 29 November 2013, Adebolajo asked to be referred to in Court as Mujaahid Abu Hamza, while Adebowale asked to be known as Ismail Ibn Abdullah. Throughout the next three weeks, both men persistently attempted to make jihadist speeches inciting violence against British soldiers from their places in the dock. At no point did either demonstrate the slightest remorse for their barbarous public attack in broad daylight on a quiet suburban street in south-east London.

  Nor did their attitudes suggest that they might have been in any way deterred from their brutal actions by the threat that they might spend the rest of their lives in a British prison now that they had been denied their dreams of martyrdom and a place in paradise because the armed Metropolitan Police officers had not killed them. They were all too clearly so swept up in their own obsessive extremism that any rational thought was beyond them.

  The same attitude applied throughout their trial at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey. Neither Adebolajo nor Adebowale appeared to pay the slightest attention to the proceedings in front of them in Court. Both ignored argument in favour of political statements and posturing. For his part, Adebolajo gave a rambling account of his views of Islam and the importance of jihad against the killers of Muslims, while Adebowale claimed that his actions had been a ‘military strike’ commanded by God and that he was a ‘soldier of Allah’. In fact, both men appeared almost unconcerned as the evidence against them was emphatically revealed by the prosecution, led by Richard Whittam QC.

  Nevertheless, during the trial something of the background of both men gradually began to emerge. It steadily became clear that Adebolajo had been a polite, well-mannered, church-going schoolboy from a loving home, and the fact that he had taken part in this vicious murder came as a profound shock to many of his friends who had known him at school. Although he had been born in Lambeth, south London, Adebolajo had been educated at Marshalls Park School in Romford, Essex, where he was known as an ‘ordinary boy’ who liked football and came from a close family who dressed in traditional Nigerian clothes on Sundays. When he left school in 2001 he was described as ‘always a good guy’ who would ‘do anything for anyone’. Although one near neighbour described Adebolajo as having a ‘fierce’ temper, that was not a widely held view. After school, he had gone on to study sociology at the University of Greenwich, though he never completed a degree. What seemed certain was that his character seemed to begin to change once he converted to Islam at that age of nineteen in 2003. At that point the young man born Michael in December 1984 insisted that from now on he wanted to be known as Mujaahid (‘one who engages in jihad’) and started to attend meetings of the militant Muslim group Al-Muhajiroun, which was later to be banned in the wake of the London bombings on the underground and bus network on Wednesday 7 July, 2005.

  There was clear evidence that he was determined to support the jihadist cause. In particular, Adebolajo had been arrested outside the Old Bailey in 2006 during a protest against the trial of Mizanur Rahman, a British Islamic activist of Pakistani descent who was accused of inciting racial hatred, of which he was eventually convicted, although the jury could not reach a verdict on the further charge of inciting murder.

  Within four years Adebolajo had journeyed to Kenya in an apparent attempt to join the militant Al-Shabaab group in Somalia linked to al-Qaeda, but was arrested by the Kenyan authorities without reaching his destination and deported back to Britain.

  When Adebolajo returned from East Africa he was interrogated repeatedly by officers from the Secret Intelligence Service about ‘certain other individuals’ he may have come into contact with. Adebolajo later claimed that he was repeatedly asked to work for British Intelligence in the wake of these conversations, but that he refused to do so.

  What is not in doubt is that both he and Adebowale were both known to the SIS, and that Adebolajo was ‘one of a small number of hard core fanatics who regularly protested alongside some of Britain’s most notorious hate clerics’, in the words of one newspaper report.

  In the years before the killing of Lee Rigby, Adebolajo was often to be found standing outside the Poundland store in Woolwich High Street in south-east London wearing a skull cap and dark jacket while handing out pro-Islam leaflets an
d haranguing passers-by for hours at a time in what one person called ‘a constant rambling monologue’ about jihad.

  Even though it also emerged that Adebolajo was married with four stepchildren and two children of his own, that did nothing to detract from the fact that he was a man trapped in the certainty of his own obsession – and, as such, a potential target of interest to Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command.

  Rather less emerged about Adebolajo’s younger companion, Michael Adebowale. Some reports suggested that he had studied alongside Adebolajo at the University of Greenwich, but those claims were formally denied by the university. It was certain, however, that he too came from a strong Christian family, and had not attracted any particular interest at school. His mother was an active probation officer, while his father was a member of the staff at the Nigerian High Commission in London. The precise date of his conversion to Islam was not revealed, although it appeared likely to have been after that of Adebolajo.

  The comparatively ordinary backgrounds of the two men in the dock did nothing to dissuade the jury from the firm conviction that they were both guilty of the barbaric murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, and the attempted murder of the armed police officers who confronted them after that killing. Just a week before Christmas, on Thursday 19 December 2013, three weeks after the trial had begun, the jury found both Adebelajo and Adebowale guilty.

  But Mr Justice Sweeney, the trial judge, adjourned sentencing until after the Court of Appeal had ruled on the arguments over whether a ‘whole life’ order was lawful in England and Wales in the light of the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in July 2013 that it was ‘inhumane’ and incompatible with Article Three of the European Convention on Human Rights.