Free Sleeper Cell by Alan Porter Page B

that no one tried to stop them. Others poured into the showroom and petrol-bombed the cars within.
    Faran retreated. He’d seen enough. If he wanted to see any more, he could turn on the TV. There were at least a dozen people who, like him, were standing back from the main group, holding mobile phones above their heads.
    By now the violence was spreading down Whitechapel Road, cutting off his escape, so he crossed Davenant Street to make his way home the back way.
    Along the road that led to the back of his building a group of two men and two women had stopped a taxi. The car’s tyres were flat and the windscreen was shattered. The passenger door of the vehicle was open.
    He was trapped. The two men smashed the driver’s side window and wrenched the door open. They pulled the asian driver out into the road and punched and kicked him as he tried to crawl under the car. When he made it far enough under the vehicle to be out of range, one of the men climbed onto the car’s roof and jumped up and down on it. The other lay beside the vehicle trying to drag the driver out. While the women ransacked the driver’s cash box, the taxi’s passenger decided to make her escape. She opened the door and made a run for it towards the main road.
    Faran scrambled over a six foot wall and stood on a bin on the other side. He could do nothing to help the taxi driver, but he could get make sure his attackers would be unable to just walk away. He zoomed in and got a perfect image of the hate-filled faces of the men.
    There was a scream from further along the road. Faran risked leaning over the wall, one eye on the road, one on the image on his phone.
    Half way along Davenant Street the two women had caught up with the taxi’s passenger. She was dressed in a chador, which was all the encouragement her attackers needed.
    They shoved the woman back and forth between them, all the time becoming more and more enraged by her screams for help. One of them pulled the veil up over the woman’s head and punched her in the face. The other took hold of the skirt part of the garment and began to rip it down.
    Faran stopped filming and moved through the back yards behind the wall. When he had gone as far as he could – he hoped, far enough that he was out of sight of the taxi – he climbed back over the wall. By now the two female attackers had torn the top half of the chador to shreds.
    Faran ran towards them. He caught the first of the women with a fist in the back of her neck. She immediately crumpled to the ground. Her accomplice screamed. Faran scanned the street for help. A small grey door had opened some fifteen feet further along the road. A terrified old man looked out, beckoning to the now almost naked Muslim woman. Faran pushed her towards the door just as the second attacker launched herself at him. Although not a big man, he was a rower and swimmer, and was more than a match for her. He threw her to the ground and began to run as he heard feet approaching him from behind.
    He glanced over his shoulder. The two men had now given up on the taxi driver and were closing in on him fast. He shoved the grey door but it didn’t move and he had no time to wait for it to be unlocked again.
    He easily outpaced his pursers as far as the main road. The sky was now almost dark, and the increasing number of fires cast huge shadows of the restless mob across the road. More police vans had arrived and officers in riot gear were breaking the crowd into smaller sections, herding them along side streets and trying to get to the mosque.
    Faran ran towards Vallance Road.
    He thought he heard a gunshot, but he couldn’t be sure. It may just have been fireworks or a car’s petrol tank exploding.
    He made it almost to the corner of his road when he ran into a group of youngsters running towards the mosque. One of them caught him on the chin with a lucky hit before running on.
    He staggered back against the fence of a derelict lot just yards from Vallance Road