Free Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda by Morten Storm, Paul Cruickshank, Tim Lister Page B

fell back in the seat. There was a faint gurgling in his throat and his eyes reopened, staring vacantly through the front window.
    I thought for a moment that he had recovered from some sort of spasm but soon found myself muttering in Arabic ‘There is no God but Allah’ to aid his passage to paradise. He coughed weakly and was gone.
    As his wife screamed hysterically, I lifted the man out of the car and was struck for an instant by how surreal the scene must seem: a large Viking carrying a sliver of an African across lanes of London traffic. A park warden ran over to tell me that he had radioed for an ambulance. But it was too late.
    It shook me. How we all hang by a thread. I helped prepare the man’s corpse for burial at the Wembley mosque in keeping with Islamic practice. As I washed the grey skin I thought about how I had seen himleave this world – and how fortunate he had been that a fellow Muslim had been on hand to pray for him as he passed.
    It was a sign. I could not die here among the kuffar . I had to be surrounded by people of my faith. Allah had prescribed it. If you died among disbelievers it was a sin. In the words of one hadith : ‘Whoever settles among the disbelievers, celebrates their feasts and joins in their revelry and dies in their midst will likewise be raised to stand with them on the Day of Resurrection.’
    The world was divided into believers and non-believers, and the worst Muslim was better than the best Christian.
    But to return to the Muslim world would require a passport. Mine had been ruined during my travels. I went to the Danish embassy in London to try to get a replacement. But they had other business with me – an outstanding criminal conviction. Back in 1996 I had been involved in a scrap in a bar over a spilt drink. I had head-butted one of my assailants and then punched another. I was arrested on the way home and later sentenced to a six-month term, to be served in typically Danish fashion when cell space became available. Before it did, I had left Denmark, and under the date-palms in Dammaj I had forgotten the whole episode. Now the sentence was overdue – and I would only get a new passport if I returned to Denmark to face the music.
    I would spend the first months of the new millennium behind bars.



CHAPTER SIX
    Death to America
    Early 2000–Spring 2002
    After negotiation with the Danish authorities, I returned home to serve my delayed sentence in early 2000. I had only one condition: I would not return to a prison where any Bandidos were held. The prison service ignored the agreement and I thought I would have to fight for my life – but discovered that other Muslims in the prison in Nyborg had formed a gang for mutual protection.
    I served my penance, spending the time weightlifting and running, but it was a time of frustration. I was desperate to return to Yemen but I had to make money. And to make money I had to gain some sort of qualification. With the help of counsellors who worked with released prisoners, I signed up for business studies at a college in Odense (which included a monthly stipend for living expenses from the Danish state) and began worshipping at the Wakf mosque. It was a lively place full of Somalis, Palestinians and Syrians that would degenerate into violence over theological disputes. During one Friday prayers I grabbed the microphone from a preacher whom I thought misguided – he had the temerity to wear his trousers below the ankles, a practice scorned by Salafis.
    ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s an innovator who belongs to one of the seventy-two sects destined for hellfire!’ I yelled.
    Odense is the home-town of Hans Christian Andersen, and its old streets and quaint gabled houses would fit neatly into a children’s story.It is a model of Danish progressiveness – bicycle paths, pedestrianized streets, green spaces. But its outskirts are less evocative. Many Muslims – first- and second-generation immigrants – had moved into its less