The day that Al-Qaeda shot me (London Times)

Saw this the other day. Its quite a dramatic, very interesting series of excerpts from a forthcoming book by a BBC journalist. A word of warning - it is extremely long hence the seperating lines. Although I can find soem criticism of is, it does reveal a chilling insight into the actions of radical Islamists.

When BBC correspondent Frank Gardner lay helpless on a Saudi street, blood pouring from his bullet-riddled body, he cursed himself for getting too close to Al-Qaeda. Here he recounts that terrible day

‘Do you have time for some supper?” called Amanda from the kitchen. I looked at my watch. It was Tuesday June 1 2004 and the car taking me to Heathrow airport would be here in 20 minutes, but I was packed and ready to go. “I’ll be right down,” I replied, and walked out of our top-floor bedroom, unaware that that was the last time I would ever see it.

Three days earlier there had been a bloodthirsty raid by Al-Qaeda fanatics in the eastern Saudi town of Al-Khobar. The terrorists had found a prominent British expatriate, Michael Hamilton, shot him dead, tied his body to their car bumper and dragged it around town in some kind of grisly parade of their power.

Then, masquerading as government security forces, they had marched into a residential complex housing many westerners, Indians and Filipinos who worked in the vast oil industry. Rounding up all those they suspected of being non-Muslims, according to the testimony of survivors, the militants coolly slit the throats of the “non-believers”. By the time order was restored, 22 people had been killed.

Saudi Arabia’s charismatic ambassador to London at the time, Prince Turki al-Faisal, had wasted no time in touring British television news studios to defend his government’s record in tackling terrorism. A former Saudi spymaster, Prince Turki was unusually open and frank. He encouraged British journalists to visit, helping with visa requests. I was to go there for BBC News with Simon Cumbers, a freelance Irish cameraman and trusted veteran of countless assignments.

Amanda and I sat up talking late that night. My wife was understandably anxious; clearly there were people on the loose in Saudi Arabia who hated westerners with a passion.

“Do you have to go to Saudi?” she asked. I did not. Unlike some other networks, the BBC is quite reasonable about asking people to go to difficult places and I have never been told the equivalent of “Go to Baghdad or pick up your P45”. But Saudi Arabia was not considered a high-risk country like Iraq or Afghanistan; I knew of no visiting journalists who had ever been threatened there.

“Then are you taking a flak jacket?” asked Amanda. This was a touchy subject between us: she has always maintained I had agreed at our wedding never to be a flak-jacket journalist, a pledge I have no recollection of making.

In truth I have never seen myself as a “war correspondent”, believing that no story is worth getting shot for, although there are occasions when it is wise to wear a flak jacket as a precaution. But I did not feel this was one of them: no civilians wore flak jackets in Saudi Arabia and if anything it would only attract unwelcome attention.

Amanda’s concerns troubled me, however, not just because I did not want her to worry while I was away but because she has an uncanny knack of being right about places she has never even been to.

“So what are you going to say when terrorists have got a gun to your head?” she asked me.

I tried to reassure her — and myself — that we were going to tread extremely carefully. We would put ourselves entirely in the care of our Saudi minders, and knowing how over-cautious they tend to be our only problem should be not getting enough access to interesting subjects.

One of the last things I packed was a miniature copy of the Koran, one of several I keep to give as presents to hospitable Muslim hosts, a gesture that always brings great appreciation.

I kissed my wife and children goodbye and watched them recede through the car’s back window on that warm summer night. I tried to dismiss the feeling of unease, reminding myself that I and had been to Saudi Arabia countless times and that I’d always felt safe there.

Soon I was at Terminal 3 with Simon. He and his wife Louise had their own freelance production company, and Simon had recently felt bad about asking one of his cameramen to go to Baghdad. He had resolved that he would take the next filming trip to the Middle East.

I remembered Al-Khobar as a quiet, dull place. There was no entertainment and little for expatriate westerners to do other than drive across the nearby causeway to freewheeling Bahrain.

When we reached the Al-Khobar Meridien, I could hardly believe it: there was a sandbag gun emplacement outside, backed by an armoured car. I had often stayed here in my former incarnation as a Gulf banker, but even during the dark days of the Gulf war in 1991 there had never been anything like this atmosphere of brooding tension. I had only been away 11 months and already this was not the Saudi Arabia I knew.

The next few days passed in a whirlwind of filming, driving and frantic editing in our hotel room, followed by a dash up the motorway to the nearest satellite uplink station in time to make the one, six or 10 o’clock TV news in Britain; in other words, pretty much typical of a foreign newsgathering trip following a big event.

In the middle of this schedule I was invited to attend the memorial service for Michael Hamilton. I sat at the back, as discreetly as I could, taking notes for the report I needed to file for the Radio 4 six o’clock news. I had never known Hamilton, but I was overwhelmed by the sadness and futility of his death. One had only to look round the room at his mourners to judge his popularity: Saudis, Britons, Bahrainis and Indians had all come to pay their respects.

The British ambassador, Sherard Cowper-Coles, read a tribute and that night we interviewed him in his hotel room, sharing my packet of Walkers shortbread fingers. He had a refreshing tendency to tell it how it is.

“Saudi Arabia does have a serious problem with terrorism,” he said, “and I predict there will be more attacks on westerners.” Prescient as he was, he could not have foreseen that Simon and I were to be Al-Qaeda’s next victims.

On the Friday, the day off in Saudi, we took the short flight to Riyadh and spent the afternoon at a barbecue with British expatriates in their walled compound. Life here had recently taken a turn for the worse, they said.

They had accepted for some time the risk of being caught up in a suicide bombing but now there was a new horror: being executed in cold blood on the basis of one’s religion or the colour of one’s skin. The expats had heard reports of Al-Qaeda scouts marking westerners’ numberplates with chalk as potential targets.

There was a chicane of concrete roadblocks outside our Riyadh hotel, but there was no visible armed guard on duty and this worried me. If Al-Qaeda decided to enter, I did not believe there would be much to stop them.

In my room I went over to the window and decided that if there was an armed raid I could probably jump down on to the tree below, which would break my fall. I felt that a raid was unlikely, though; the summer heat meant there were so few western guests in the hotel it would hardly have been worth Al-Qaeda’s time.

Simon and I wanted to report how the Saudi authorities were combating the country’s Al-Qaeda-inspired terror cells. We spent a morning traipsing round the ministry of information, applying for permission to film. Saudi Arabia does not allow unescorted film crews, partly for their own safety. Many Saudis are deeply suspicious of foreigners with cameras, convinced they are trying to film their women or pass the footage to some western government.

We asked to film three things: checkpoints and other physical security measures; an interview with a senior counter-terrorist official; and a general view towards Al-Suwaidi, a restive area of south Riyadh where there had been a shoot-out six months earlier between police and an Islamist cell leader, Ibrahim al-Rayyes, who had been killed.

The ministry of information was not encouraging about our requests and — as Arab government ministries close at 2pm — we went back to our hotel for lunch and a swim, planning to fly home the next day. I took a call from BBC2’s Newsnight, asking me if we could stay on, but I said we were reluctant to hang around in this tense atmosphere when we had nothing firmed up to film.

So it was somewhat to our surprise that permission came through in mid-afternoon to film around Riyadh, including the district of Al-Suwaidi. Reluctantly — because we had mentally finished our trip — we roused ourselves from the pool and went up to our rooms to change.

I watched a few minutes of the D-Day 60th anniversary celebrations on television, admiring the veterans in their berets and medals and pleased that my father had made the trip back there with my mother.

We piled our camera gear into a government minivan. Mubarak, a black Saudi, one of thousands of Arabs with African ancestry, was at the wheel. Beside him was Yahya, our assigned “minder” from the ministry. I had never worked with him before but he assured me immediately that he was an old hand at chaperoning foreign film crews.

Yahya seemed very easy-going and far more eager to help than most of the government minders I have encountered in the Arab world. We were free to go wherever we chose in Riyadh, he said, but we could not film checkpoints.

We asked to go straight to the edge of Al-Suwaidi and drove south through the suburbs of Riyadh. They were unremarkable to look at: low, whitewashed, flat-roofed buildings, usually above a row of shops selling cold drinks, fabric and spare car parts.

People were just starting to emerge on to the streets after the mid-afternoon siesta; a few of the men, I noticed, wore the short robes and long beards of devout fundamentalists. Here and there was a neon-lit fast-food joint, a sandy backstreet, an overflowing litter bin. One could sense this was a poorer part of town, but the poverty was not extreme.

When we drew up on the edge of Al-Suwaidi it looked exactly like every other residential housing area I have known in the Gulf states: villas surrounded by high walls topped by purple bougainvillea. Patches of flat stony wasteground separated the buildings, and while there was some graffiti on the walls there were also several expensive four-wheel-drive cars parked in the shade.

The area was now calm, we had been assured, but still we had no wish to go into it, only to film from a distance to give the viewer an impression of what the place looked like.

There was not a soul around, although after a while some laughing children appeared and wanted us to film them. Simon got me to do what is known as a “walking piece to camera”, one of those earnest, strolling soliloquies from the reporter that is supposed to set the scene in context, or at least prove to the viewer that the reporter has been there.

Simon and I had agreed in advance that we would spend no more than 10 minutes here, but Yahya was very relaxed and certainly there was nothing to suggest any kind of threat — no furtive figures darting into doorways, no twitching curtains — so we did several takes from different angles to get the filming just right.

Again and again I strolled across the wasteground towards the camera, pausing to deliver my words and point out the villas in the background where police had traded fire with militants six months earlier.

After about half an hour we were on the verge of packing up when a car pulled up close to our minivan. I was vaguely aware of some people in the distance, but when a young Saudi got out of the car there was nothing suspicious about him at first.

Like every adult male Saudi, he wore the traditional white thaub, essentially a smart shirt that extends all the way down to the ankles. He looked very young, perhaps still in his teens, and had a kindly face with a hint of a smile, almost as if he knew us or our two Saudi escorts. Was he coming to ask directions? Perhaps he knew the driver and had come to chat.

Looking straight at me, he called out, “Assalaamu aleikum” (“Peace be upon you”). All over the Arab and Islamic world this is the traditional Muslim greeting, a reassurance to a stranger that you wish him no harm.

I replied with the standard response: “Wa aleikum assalaam wa rahmatullah wa barakaatuh” (“And upon you the peace and the mercy of God and His blessings”).

The man paused, a curious look on his face, then with no sign of haste he reached his right hand into what must have been a specially extended pocket sewn into the breast of his thaub. I did not need to see the weapon to know what was coming next. It was like a film with a predictable ending.

He pulled out a long-barrelled pistol. Oh my God, I thought, this cannot be happening.

I ran for my life, sprinting away from our van and into the deeply conservative quarter of Al-Suwaidi. There was a loud crack behind me and I felt something sting my shoulder. I didn’t know it then but the bullet passed clean through, hitting the shoulder bone on the way.

My adrenaline must have been pumping because I remember it being no more painful than a bee sting, and I ran on, trying to put as much distance as possible between me and the gunman. For a few brief, happy seconds I thought I was actually going to make it, trusting in the power of my legs to outrun my attackers.

I felt almost euphoric at the prospect of escaping them, and I began to look ahead for cover. There was not much. Everywhere I looked there were high, windowless walls, locked doors and wide open spaces. But it was academic; I never made it that far.

There was another loud bang and the next thing I knew I was down on my front on the tarmac, felled by a bullet in the leg. I had run slap into the terrorists’ second team; they had overtaken me in a minivan to cut off my escape. Now they were crowded inside the open sliding door of their van while I lay prone and helpless on the ground, looking up in horror at this group of Islamist gunmen.

They appeared very different from my first attacker; they had made no attempt to disguise their jihadi appearance. Their thin, pale faces were framed by wispy, unkempt beards in the style of most extremists and they had the look of people who spent all their time indoors.

Instead of the neatly arranged headdresses with a sharp crease in the middle worn by ordinary urban Saudis, these men wore theirs wound tightly round their foreheads like a bandage. It was the isaaba, the dress worn by jihadi fighters who consider they are about to go into battle, the same style worn by the 9/11 suicidal hijackers in their video testimonies and by Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the July 7 London bombers, in his posthumously released video warning to the West.

I realised then that I was doomed. These men were no casual, have-a-go amateurs; they were the real thing, a hardcore Al-Qaeda terror cell bent on attacking their government, killing westerners and “cleansing the Arabian peninsula of infidels”.

In that instant I glimpsed faces driven by pure hatred and fanaticism. I pleaded with them in Arabic, as so many hostages have done in Iraq, while they held a brief discussion as to what to do with me. It did not take long. They responded to my pleas by opening fire once more.

EVEN THEN it crossed my mind how unfair this was. I had spent four years studying Islam for my degree, learning Arabic, reading and translating the Koran and other Islamic texts. I had lived happily among Arab families, fasted with Bedu tribespeople in Jordan, taught English to the impoverished family of an Egyptian taxi driver in a verminous Cairo slum.

For the past few years I had tried hard to explain the complexities of the Middle East and the thinking behind the Al-Qaeda phenomenon to western and international audiences. And this was my reward? A bunch of bullets in the guts from men who had convinced themselves they were killing in the cause of Islam. It just did not seem right.

From somewhere close behind me a gunman stood over me and pumped bullets into the small of my back, hitting my pelvis and sacral bones and causing immeasurable damage to my internal organs. I don’t remember it hurting at the point of impact, just a deafening noise each time he squeezed the trigger and a sickening jolt as the bullets thudded into my guts. Each time he fired it was as if a giant hand had picked me up and slammed me down on the tarmac. It rocked my whole inner body frame, like the chassis of a car in a head-on collision.

Bloody hell, I thought, I’m really being shot. I’m taking a lot of rounds here. So is this where I float gracefully up into the sky and look down at my body sprawled out below? What an idiot you are. You’re supposed to report on Al-Qaeda, not get so close to them you end up getting killed!

There was one thought in my head that overrode all the others. I have to survive this, I told myself, for the sake of Amanda and my girls. I cannot leave them on this earth without a husband and a father.

I closed my eyes and kept as still as I could, face-down on my front. The shooting had stopped and there was a discussion going on in Arabic. One of the terrorists was getting out of the van and walking towards me.

I held my breath, playing dead while I listened to his footsteps drawing closer. I felt a hand reach into the back pocket of my trousers and remove Simon’s radio microphone (which they left at the scene). Then he fished into the other back pocket and took out that miniature copy of the Koran that I had remembered to pack in London.

There followed a terrifying few seconds when any number of horrors could have been inflicted on me. In the previous week this same cell had dragged Michael Hamilton’s lifeless body from the back of their vehicle. Would they now be tempted to do the same to me?

The week after the attack on us an American helicopter technician, Paul Johnson, would be kidnapped in Riyadh and beheaded, his captors filming his execution then keeping his severed head in the family freezer for days until it was discovered in a police raid. I have no idea if the Koran in my pocket saved my life or if the terrorists were by now convinced they had finished me off.

For me, lying punctured and bleeding on the ground, there suddenly came the sweetest sound in the world: the noise of my attackers revving up their engine and driving off. They were leaving me for dead. There followed total silence. No wail of sirens, no crying of children, no clatter of approaching feet.

Ominously, there was no sign of Simon, the minder or the driver either. It seemed I was completely alone. Why wasn’t anybody coming to my rescue?

I felt many things at once: I was relieved and amazed to be still alive, I was furious at the injustice of this attack, yet I was surprisingly calm. I waited until I thought the coast was clear then I flipped over on to my back, supporting myself half upright with extended arms so I could call out more effectively for help.

As I turned I felt my legs roll over like two dead logs, my feet flopping flat and lifeless against the ground. My right leg was bent in and out at crazy angles and I could feel nothing below the waist.

“Damn,” I remember thinking, “that’s not good. If I survive this I’m going to need some serious physiotherapy.” Unseen by me, someone was discreetly photographing me with a mobile phone and this was the grainy image that appeared in newspapers and on TV within hours.

By now the adrenaline had worn off and I was in the most excruciating, indescribable pain. The clean white shirt I had pulled on an hour ago for the piece to camera was saturated in blood. I had lost count of the number of times I had been shot.

In a cracked and desperate voice I cried out in Arabic for help. My cries were of base, animal pain. I was emitting sounds I did not even recognise.

At first no one came; the place was deserted. Then a handful of local Saudi men drifted on to the scene and my heart leapt. With their straggly beards and loosely wrapped headdresses they looked disturbingly like the people who had just shot me. Had they come to finish me off?

Before I had time to think about it they were joined by a dozen more locals. Despite the pain, I felt reassured by the crowd, which was now getting sufficiently large that if anyone was carrying a concealed weapon he was unlikely to pull it out in front of so many witnesses.

And then the strangest thing happened. Nobody helped me. In Muslim society, charity and hospitality are legendary. I have known Egyptians cross four lanes of rush-hour traffic to help with a flat tyre; an Omani minister once gave me his prized walking cane inscribed with his title in silver; Indonesians have slaughtered their sole goat to share with me. And yet here I was, lying in the road, obviously very badly injured, and yet nobody came to help.

That is one of the things I remember most: the terrible feeling of loneliness, the sense that I was completely on my own, that I could not rely on anyone to help me. I was obviously an object of interest: there was plenty of discussion and pointing at the empty cartridge cases that lay all around me. But something to staunch the blood? A pillow? A glass of water? Even a few words of comfort? Forget it.

The only charitable explanation I can think of is that perhaps nobody dared come near me lest they get dragged off to the police station as a witness.

Staying alive became an endurance test. I feared that if I blacked out and lost consciousness I would be dead by the time I reached hospital, so I willed myself to stay alert.

I had never considered myself to be particularly tough (I have always been a complete wuss about cold showers), but I had had some experience of endurance challenges, having run two marathons at university and completed Hong Kong’s 100km MacLehose Trail in under 24 hours. But this was different, it was like nothing I had ever known in my life. Bizarrely, I remember thinking, “Ah, but Frank, you have never given birth and that must be quite an ordeal.”

When the police finally showed up after about half an hour, alerted by somebody in the neighbourhood, they joined a growing throng of people all gawking at me from a distance. It was strange that in years of broadcasting I had never felt self-conscious, despite knowing that millions of people were watching. Yet here I was, being closely observed by 30 or so people, and it did not feel good.

By now I had lost a lot of blood. I was still conscious, but there was no sign of an ambulance or any medics; the policemen seemed unsure of what to do with me.

Somebody asked me if I had noted down the numberplate of the attackers’ van. I think I replied that I had been too busy getting shot to notice, but I did tell them I was British. I knew that Britain was almost as unpopular as America in some quarters here, because of the Iraq invasion, but I hoped that someone would get word to the British embassy.

Several khaki-clothed policemen manhandled me into the back of their patrol car. Aware that I was a bloody mess of broken bones and gunshot wounds, they laid me lengthways on some kind of plank contraption. They did the best they could, but the length of my body was greater than the width of their car. And so I remember my head and shoulders protruded ludicrously from one of the back windows.

The police car drove off at speed, sirens blaring, lurching initially over rough bumpy wasteland. I had no idea where they were taking me, but I was in too much pain to care. On top of the agony the bullet wounds were causing me, I now had to grip on to the roof of the car to stop my head getting knocked about.

We pulled up at last at the Al-Iman hospital — not, I learnt later, one of Riyadh’s finest. There was a huge commotion at the doorway as everyone argued how best to extract me from my rear compartment and on to a hospital trolley, while I lay groaning and writhing but still conscious. At one stage I was being pulled in opposite directions.

I was rushed through the hospital doors and into the operating theatre. My last memory was of looking up at the faces of the surgeons. They wore an expression close to panic. Then my pleas for painkillers were answered. A needle slid into my arm and I sank at last into oblivion.

© Frank Gardner 2006 Extracted from Blood & Sand: Love, Death and Survival in an Age of Global Terror by Frank Gardner, to be published by Bantam Press on May 8 at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.09 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

Shot by terrorists, Frank Gardner’s greatest fear was how to be a father in a wheelchair

---------------------------------------------- On the evening of Sunday June 6, 2004, in the heavily secure diplomatic quarter of Riyadh, a meeting at the British embassy was interrupted by a diplomat who rushed in with the news that two British journalists had been shot on the other side of the Saudi capital. Sherard Cowper-Coles, the ambassador, was chairing the meeting. He thought for a moment. He knew of only two journos working for the British media in the country at that time: me and Simon Cumbers, an Irish freelance cameraman.

The ambassador got straight into his chauffeured, reinforced car and headed south for Al-Suwaidi, the district where the attack had taken place. His first stop was the mortuary, where Simon had been taken.

Only two days earlier Simon had filmed an interview I did with the ambassador and we had all shared my Walkers shortbread fingers. Now, tragically, Simon was dead and, as the ambassador quickly discovered, the Riyadh police were rushing me, bleeding and screaming, to hospital.

The ambassador called the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz, who ordered a team of top surgeons to come to my rescue. By an amazing stroke of luck, they were led by Peter Bautz, a young South African trauma surgeon who had seen more than his fair share of gunshot victims in Cape Town.

I had been shot six times running away from a group of Al-Qaeda gunmen who had attacked us as we filmed on a street we had been taken to by a Saudi government minder. Most of the bullets had hit me in the lower centre of the body, not enough to kill me outright but enough to finish me off within a couple of hours if I did not have expert surgery.

Bautz told me later that had his team not arrived when they did, with their hi-tech equipment and expertise, I would have died that night. The hospital notes paint a picture of a man about to move on somewhere else: “Upon arrival of Dr Bautz the patient was seen in the operating room with open abdomen, bleeding extensively. His body temperature was 30C (86F) and he had disseminated intravascular coagulation. He was in hypovolemic shock and was oozing from all cut surfaces.”

Months later, when I showed this to an army doctor friend he went pale. “Strewth! You had DIC! That’s where you are so severely injured that the blood starts clotting all over the body. Your whole body effectively becomes one big wound. It’s the endgame, one of the last things before death.”

When I asked Bautz how they had brought me back from the brink, he told me: “The DIC had everything thrown at it, including two doses of Activated Factor 7, a miracle drug. It’s verrry expensive!”

While Bautz and his team were battling to save me, 3,000 miles away in England my parents were casually watching the Ten O’Clock News on BBC1. At the mention of two British journalists shot in Riyadh my father turned grimly to my mother. “It’s Frank,” he said.

Two BBC managers, Mark Damazer and Sarah Ward-Lilley, raced round to our house to break the news to Amanda, my wife. She was just putting our two daughters to bed. Initially it was too much for her to take in.

“Could you hang on,” she said politely, “while I just read the children a goodnight story?” A few minutes later she came back downstairs. “Now,” she said, “tell me what has happened.”

EIGHT days later I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed. Amanda’s face smiled down at me. “Honey, you made it!” she cried. “You’re my hero!”

This was too much to take in and I closed my eyes again. Perhaps she was wrong. How could he not be alive any more? Surely if I had survived he must have done too.

I was in the King Faisal specialist hospital, one of the best equipped in the world. I remember little of it, just the sweet-sour smell of urine and an overwhelming thirst. My guts were so badly damaged that I was not supposed to drink anything, but Amanda was allowed to give me tiny drops of mango juice, which I sucked from a sponge on the end of a stick.

After 18 days Bautz let me go home. The Saudi government generously paid both the hospital bill and the cost of the flight home, strapped down on a stretcher in a sleek executive jet. From Luton airport, a little red helicopter transferred me to the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel, where the consultants and registrars, earnest-looking men in pinstripe suits, all lined up to receive me.

On the way to the high dependency unit (HDU), a halfway house between intensive care and a normal ward, we passed a private room guarded by a cluster of armed police in bulletproof vests. I was alarmed to see guns again so soon, but a nurse said nonchalantly: “The patient’s a drug-dealer or something. Got shot in the neck in a drive-by last week. Police are just making sure the people who did it don’t come and finish the job.”

Partly for my own security and partly to ward off any press inquiries, I was given a pseudonym: “Dan Kilo, Unknown”. I rather liked Dan Kilo, it made me think of some comic-book hero.

In the HDU someone handed me a mirror and I saw myself for the first time since being shot. I was a shocking sight. My eyes were yellow with jaundice from my liver being thrown out of kilter by the cocktail of drugs I had been fed over the past three weeks. But what horrified me most was the sight of my legs, especially the left one. Lying slack and useless after being disconnected from my spinal nerves, the thigh was withered where the muscles had atrophied to little more than skin and bone, and I did not recognise it as my own.

I had a cannula for a dripfeed inserted into the back of my hand, which was purple, bruised and swollen. A large tube called a “central line” for administering drugs ran into the side of my neck and to this was attached a whole cluster of drips like a bunch of grapes, so that it hurt to turn my head.

A nasal-gastric tube fed through my nostril and all the way down the back of my throat into my stomach to provide basic nutrients. Another pair of much smaller plastic tubes provided oxygen; they smelt of stale cigarettes. I had a vacuum dressing on my abdomen where nine abdominal operations known as “laparotomies” had been performed and the flesh was raw. A colostomy bag was attached to my right side which a nurse came to check at intervals.

My bladder was another war zone; it had been punctured by bullets. I had never seen a catheter before, in fact I was not entirely sure what they were, but now the nurse pointed out two, like a salesman showing off the features of a new car. I had what is called a suprapubic catheter coming straight out of my abdomen. I could see the second one, known as an “in-dwelling” catheter, emerging to my alarm from the tip of my penis. I was briefly thankful not to have been awake when that one was inserted.

When nobody was looking I took a quick peek down there. There was some colourful bruising but mercifully no bullet holes. Frank Cross, the trauma surgeon who now took charge, told me later that when they first examined me my genitals were so badly bruised it looked as if I had been “helping the police with their inquiries”.

All in all I was still in quite a state. Yet still I did not realise that I could be paraplegic — largely paralysed below the waist; I convinced myself that the numbness I felt in my buttocks and pelvis was just from lying too long in a bed.

In August the urologists decided my bladder had healed. “They can take out his urethral catheter now,” I heard one say.

“So, we’ll just whip that out, shall we?” said the nurse, glancing at my groin. Gloves on, sheet back, deep breath. But one gentle tug was enough to send me into paroxysms of pain in the genitals.

“Well, honey, we can take a break for now but I’m going to have to come back and do it soon. You’re just going to have to be strong.”

I took a gulp of water, ate some Mini Cheddars, flicked between TV channels, anything to take my mind off what was to come. When the door opened and the rubber gloves came on again it occurred to me how useless I would be under torture. “Just make it quick,” I said.

“Ahh . . . Aaarrrggh!” I could hardly believe what came out. The far end of the catheter looked like a folded-up cocktail umbrella.

I still had the other catheter attached through the abdominal wall, and since my genitals were in shock after the cocktail-umbrella treatment I decided to keep peeing through it. After a few days I woke up one morning with a full bladder, as one does, and reached for the cardboard urine bottle. To my huge delight a few drops came out from where nature intended.

I was so excited I rang my parents, who really ought to have been spared such details. But the following morning the ward sister burst my bubble, so to speak. “I’m afraid if it was only a few drops that was just stress from a full bladder. It’s very common. We call it ‘firing off’.”

She was right. My subsequent attempts to wet the inside of the cardboard bottle came to nothing. My worst fears were confirmed: the bullets had knocked out the sacral nerves that control the bladder. I was not incontinent, I was overcontinent, condemned to a lifetime of peeing through catheters.

Over the summer a number of BBC colleagues came to see me. Many had been to far more dangerous places than I had. Brian Hanrahan, who had covered the Falklands war; Orla Guerin, the Middle East correspondent who put on a flak jacket like other people put on socks; Ben Brown, the special correspondent, who had been to just about everywhere on the planet where people were shooting at each other, yet always managed to return with a perfect tan and no injuries; John Simpson, who had had a narrow escape when the US air force shot up the convoy he was travelling with; Stuart Hughes, a producer who had lost half his leg to a landmine in the Iraq war; Caroline Hawley, the Baghdad correspondent who shared the Cairo bureau with me and now worked in an atmosphere of constant fear of car bombs, kidnappers and snipers; and Tony Fallshaw and Duncan Stone, two of the bravest and best cameramen in foreign news.

All of these people and others showed amazing courage in pursuing their stories in dangerous conditions and yet now I found myself being drawn involuntarily into their Club of the Brave.

It was starting to dawn on me just how serious my injuries were. I had absolutely no movement below my hips, although my legs and feet were in pain all day every day, and I still had a huge raw wound in my belly. I asked the lead neurosurgeon what my chances of walking again were.

“If I were a betting man,” he said, “I’d say you probably won’t walk again. But with nerve damage you can never be sure.”

That was a black day. Naively, I had thought that hard work through physio would be enough to get me back on my feet. I envisaged kick-starting nerves with sweaty sessions on a static bicycle. Perhaps a bit of gentle hydrotherapy in a warm pool. The idea that I could be paralysed for life had simply not registered until then. I sulked for a day, pouring my fears out to Amanda.

Then one evening, while jiggling my hips to keep the blood circulating in my legs, I discovered a muscle twitch in my inner thigh. There was life down there after all. The nurse was almost as thrilled as I was. The on-call house doctor confirmed there was nerve activity below the waist. But next morning Frank Cross brought me down to earth. “Don’t get too excited,” he said. “It’s just the first slippered footstep on a long road to recovery.”

I was taken down in the lift to somewhere that, for me, held almost as much terror as an Iraqi interrogation chamber: the colorectal department. The white coats wanted to know if I still had muscle tone down there and proposed a series of progressively uncomfortable tests.

I cannot imagine what had possessed the tall and beautiful girl who greeted me to make a career out of inserting things up people’s bottoms, but she did her best to put me at ease. “You make yourself comfortable and face the wall while I get everything ready.”

She showed me a very thin catheter. “Now, Frank, I’m just going to insert this, then inflate it, like so . . . okay, you should now feel as if you need to pass wind.” I did.

“And now . . . this should feel like you need to empty your bowels.” It did. “And this . . . should feel like you’re absolutely desperate to go.”

I half expected her to say: “Tell us the truth, Frank, and I can make the pain go away.”

The colorectal nurse had a whole raft of other devices lined up, including something that was bubbling in a miniature cauldron. But since I howled at the first touch of her little finger the exercise had to be aborted and I was wheeled back to the ward in disgrace.

MELISSA and Sasha, my daughters, became a familiar sight in the hospital. One of their favourite games was to put the unused cardboard bedpans upside down on their heads so they looked like cowboy hats. Another time Amanda found them playing doctors, having got hold of a stethoscope that they clamped to each other’s chests, their little faces solemn with concentration. But the journey from home to the East End proved increasingly tedious for my family. It was time to move to the Chelsea and Westminster hospital.

Being in Chelsea did wonders for my morale as people flocked to my bedside. My dear friend Khaled Al-Sabah, who had crossed the border into Iraq with me in 1991, generously gave me a new mobile phone (my bloodstained BBC mobile was still in the tender care of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch). He also brought me a bottle of exceptionally good claret, which we drank out of plastic cups with our lukewarm takeaway pizza.

Jo Cayford, from the BBC, brought me a tub of caviar from Moscow; I enjoyed the look on the nurses’ faces when I asked if they would bring me my caviar from the communal fridge. John Simpson and his wife Dee ambled over from their Chelsea pad, he fresh from a dangerous assignment, I fresh from having my colostomy bag changed.

Others insisted I get into a wheelchair so we could go off to a restaurant for the evening. The first time this happened an Indian waiter bent down and said: “I must tell you, sir, that we don’t have disabled access to toilets on this floor.”

I thought: “Why is he telling me this? I’m not disabled.” And then it hit me. Of course. Disabled. That’s me now.

From Chelsea I was sent to a physio rehab unit in the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital at Stanmore, a bizarre place. Situated on the outer reaches of northwest London, it has a leafy, rural feel. Deer forage in woods and fields.

The buildings were in a decrepit state; the corrugated roofs were overgrown with grass and moss, and rainwater often trickled into the corridors. Yet it has a reputation for being one of the best places in the country for rehabilitating spinal injury patients. Unfortunately, nobody explained what I could expect to achieve there. I told friends they would be trying to get my legs working again. But I was quickly disillusioned.

On day one the consultant, Dr Gall, came in to give me an “Asia” (American Spinal Injuries Association) test. This involved pushing and tweaking my legs to see how much sensitivity and movement I had left. It was one of the most depressing hours of my life.

Next came a sensitivity test in a sensitive part of the body. A Jordanian doctor asked me to roll on my side and pull down my tracksuit bottoms. He took out something that looked like a map pin and slowly, deliberately, jabbed me in the anus. I felt it all right; I virtually hit the wall with pain.

“Good,” he said. “If you have sensitivity there that means your injury is incomplete. You are what we call ‘sensory incomplete’, which means you might have a 20% chance of walking again.”

The ordeal was not over. “Now we need you to roll over on to your back,” said the doctors. Another jab in another sensitive part of the body, more pain and more nods of approval. I half expected them to move on to my eyeballs.

I was now left alone with my thoughts in a small dark room. Down the passageway I could hear children laughing and playing, and suddenly I felt very, very low. My own children were far away on the other side of London and I would not be tucking them into bed tonight or any time soon. How long had it been since I last read them their bedtime story? It seemed a lifetime since I had slept under the same roof as my family and I missed them desperately.

The prospect of being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of my life terrified me. But one day a visiting friend brought me a DVD of the latest Tom Cruise film, Collateral. When it came to the bit where Cruise’s hitman character guns down a gang of thugs in a backstreet, I sat bolt upright in bed. This was suddenly, chillingly familiar: the roar of the pistol going off, followed immediately by the clink of the ejected cartridge case hitting the metalled surface of the road.

I had forgotten that, but now Hollywood had brought it back in sharp relief. I could remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday, that deafening roar as the Al-Qaeda gunman’s pistol went off, pointing directly at the centre of my body, the earth-moving thump of each bullet as it slammed into me and then that high-pitched, almost musical tinkle of the cartridge case landing on the tarmac beside me.

It was all too real. But I did not want to have a problem every time a gun went off on television so I “inoculated” myself by pressing pause, rewind, then play, pause, rewind and play, until I was thoroughly bored with that sequence. I don’t have a problem with on-screen gunshots now.

In November I had two more hurdles to get over: my first visit home and the memorial service for Simon Cumbers. Emma Linley, my occupational therapist, warned me: “When spinally injured patients go home for the first time they’re suddenly confronted with a glimpse of their past life. Often the house they lived in before is not going to be suitable for them now they’re in a wheelchair.”

We lived in a typical late-Victorian terraced house, tall and narrow with 36 stairs and lots of half-floors and landings. Although I had practised car transfers, it was still a major operation to get me out of Emma’s car, onto a sliding board and across that into my wheelchair, all the while holding up the traffic in our narrow street. I felt intensely self-conscious as I was wheeled up over the kerb, through the piles of dry autumn leaves and up to our front door. One of our neighbours waved cheerfully but I did not feel like talking to anyone. I could not wait to be off the street and inside.

Then it was through the same front door that I had trotted briskly out of, rucksack over my shoulder, on my way to Saudi Arabia just five months before, and into our narrow hallway. Amanda was waiting with fresh-brewed coffee and warm croissants. We soon found we could only just turn me round to get into the living room and it took both Emma and Amanda to lower me down the two steps into the kitchen. I felt very much an invalid. We had no bathroom on the ground floor and Emma’s expression was pretty grim.

By the end of the visit — which included me having to shoo the others out of the living room so I could go to the loo in a bag — it was painfully obvious: no amount of adaptations were going to be enough here, we would have to sell our family home and move out. We did not break this straight away to the children when they were collected from school that afternoon. Instead, Amanda told them there was a surprise in the living room, where I lay hidden under a rug. Then Sasha spotted a foot and squealed: “It’s Daddy! He’s come home!”

SIMON’S memorial service was held in St Bride’s, the journalists’ church just off Fleet Street. Louise Bevan, his widow, did him proud. On top of organising everything, she arranged a tot of Bushmills 10-year-old Irish whiskey for everyone in church, 350 glasses in all, during the singing of Jerusalem.

For all of us there, Simon’s memorial service was very, very hard and I found I was unable to talk about it for a long time afterwards. Orla Guerin tried to inject a lighter note in her speech.

“As Simon is probably watching me right now I will try to do this in one take,” she said from the pulpit as she began listing the many ways in which he had been such a pleasure to work with. But when she remembered how on every assignment Simon had never failed to mention his beloved Louise, Orla broke down and we cried with her.

After all my months in hospital it finally hit home hard: Simon was dead, because of the trip we had gone on. I had survived and he had not. I would have given anything to wake up and realise it had just been a terrible dream, that Simon was still doing what he loved, making superb films or just making everyone around him smile and laugh.

Just as everyone was heading from the church to the reception, Simon played his final joke. A rumour that Yasser Arafat had died prompted all the news people to dash around with mobiles clamped to their ears. The rumour was false: Arafat still had a week to live.

I arranged with friends to break out of Stanmore for a day and take Melissa and Sasha to the London Wetland Centre in Barnes, a wonderful expanse of lakes and marsh where ducks and geese fly in from Siberia for the winter. We had brought the girls here before I was injured and they had loved using my binoculars and peering out of the wooden hides, but this outing was to be unexpectedly hard for me.

As I sat in my wheelchair, unable to join in their chasing games, I began to realise what I had lost. Whereas before I would have whirled them round or plopped them up on my shoulders, now I could only watch from the side, feeling like a passive grandparent out for a spin in the park. I thought: “I’m 43, I’m not ready for this.”

When I told Amanda, however, she sensibly told me to stop being so morbid. “Ah, cheap thrills,” she said. “Anyone can whirl them round but they’ll soon grow out of that. You’re their daddy and now they’ve got you back.”

Extracted from Blood & Sand: Love, Death and Survival in an Age of Global Terror by Frank Gardner, to be published by Bantam Press on May 8 at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.09 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

This man is a complete idiot.

"....it crossed my mind how unfair this was. I had spent four years studying Islam for my degree, learning Arabic, reading and translating the Koran and other Islamic texts. I had lived happily among Arab families, fasted with Bedu tribespeople in Jordan, taught English to the impoverished family of an Egyptian taxi driver in a verminous Cairo slum.

For the past few years I had tried hard to explain the complexities of the Middle East and the thinking behind the Al-Qaeda phenomenon to western and international audiences. And this was my reward? A bunch of bullets in the guts from men who had convinced themselves they were killing in the cause of Islam. It just did not seem right."

"Before I had time to think about it they were joined by a dozen more locals. Despite the pain, I felt reassured by the crowd, which was now getting sufficiently large that if anyone was carrying a concealed weapon he was unlikely to pull it out in front of so many witnesses.

And then the strangest thing happened. Nobody helped me. In Muslim society, charity and hospitality are legendary. I have known Egyptians cross four lanes of rush-hour traffic to help with a flat tyre; an Omani minister once gave me his prized walking cane inscribed with his title in silver; Indonesians have slaughtered their sole goat to share with me. And yet here I was, lying in the road, obviously very badly injured, and yet nobody came to help.

That is one of the things I remember most: the terrible feeling of loneliness, the sense that I was completely on my own, that I could not rely on anyone to help me. I was obviously an object of interest: there was plenty of discussion and pointing at the empty cartridge cases that lay all around me. But something to staunch the blood? A pillow? A glass of water? Even a few words of comfort? Forget it."

After all his study. he just doesn't seem to realise that he is an Infidel, and no Muslim will help him.

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