She said, ‘Amir, I’m very glad that you have decided to help us. We also want to stop others getting involved in all this. I’m going to explain what I can do to meet your terms. First, about Tahira. I’ve met her and talked to her.’ Amir looked surprised, but Liz went on, ‘She is terribly worried about you. She wanted to come and see you but your father wouldn’t let her.’
He nodded as if that were no surprise.
‘I’m sure she would want you to know that she is helping us, and I’m equally sure that she would want you to help us too.’ Amir frowned and Liz went on quickly, before he could speak. ‘I can promise you that when this is over, we’ll look after her. But I don’t think it would be a good idea for her to come over to Paris to see you now. If she did, I could not guarantee to keep her safe, as we couldn’t be sure her trip would remain secret – not right now, at any rate. But I will ask her to write to you and I’ll either bring the letter myself or give it to my French colleagues to give to you.’
‘What is she doing to help you? Are you putting her in danger?’
‘She is only doing what she wants to do.’ Liz’s eyes were focused on Amir. ‘No one is putting any pressure on her. She’s helping us because she wants to help you. You are lucky to have such a sister.’
‘I know.’
‘Now about your position, Amir. As you know, it hasn’t yet been decided whether you should be charged, or even whether you should remain in France or return to the UK. I can’t give you any guarantees. But if you talk to us truthfully, that will certainly be taken into consideration, both by us in the UK and,’ she looked at Martin with raised eyebrows and he nodded, ‘by the French.’
‘But if I talk to you, they’ll kill me if they can.’
‘If you talk frankly to us, we and our French colleagues will have the responsibility of looking after you – and Tahira, of course. And if that meant you couldn’t go back to Birmingham, then we would help you go somewhere else.’
Amir had been staring at Liz as she explained all this. Now he was hesitating, clearly trying to make up his mind what to do.
Martin said gently, ‘My advice is that you should tell us your story.’
Amir nodded. ‘I haven’t got a choice really, have I?’
And he began to talk. He’d first gone to the New Springfield Mosque with Malik and had been fascinated by the preaching of Imam Bakri and his message of the duty of all true Muslims to wage war against the infidel. Amir described how he’d been asked to join an inner group of true believers which had met weekly for several months. Then they had all gone three times to a mosque in North London where they had met a woman – a white woman, who spoke beautiful Arabic and talked enthrallingly about jihad.
‘She was a witch. A blonde witch,’ he said. ‘She enchanted us and took away our souls. She told us we had been chosen to be on the front line of the fight and we would be blessed. No one told us where we would go, but we thought it would be Afghanistan.’
The officials of the New Springfield Mosque had made all the travel arrangements and they were kept very secret. ‘They told me to go to my uncle in Rawalpindi, where I would be contacted, so I did. One day three men came to see me there, and I went with them. They gave me Pakistani travel documents and arranged for me to go to Athens.’
He went on to describe how he had got to Mombasa by ship, then by road to Somalia where he joined a group of Arabs who ran a training camp in the desert. ‘It was very difficult getting there overland – we arrived ten days later than expected.’ It was then that the decision was taken to take new recruits in future directly from the ships off the Horn, rather have the human cargo unloaded a thousand kilometres away in Kenya and wait for it to make its way north to Somalia.
So the Arabs moved camp, to a compound that was already inhabited by Somali pirates, on the coast about ten miles south of Mogadishu.
Liz interjected, ‘And the Arabs then tried to hijack the Aristides?’
‘Yes. They saw how easy it was – the pirates had been doing it successfully for years, so the Arabs decided to do it themselves. That way they’d get their new recruits and also make money by ransoming the ships and stealing the cargoes.’
‘Didn’t the Somali pirates object?’
Amir shook his head. ‘Their leader wasn’t happy, but he was frightened of the Arabs. So was I, to tell you the truth; and the Arabs knew it. The leader was a tall, thin man with burning eyes – I think he was mad – who made me go with the others on a pirate raid because he claimed it would make me brave. I think he just wanted an eye kept on me.
‘It was terrifying. They made me go up the ladder first and when the French Navy boat came up, they sailed off and I fell in the sea. And that’s how I got captured. The others were captured, too, and they told me if I said anything they’d find out, and then they’d kill me. Are some of them are here in this prison?’
