Escape from Saddam (26 page)

“Now then, Lewis,” I was told, “we have a choice. I can handcuff you now and lead you out of the store. I don’t want to do that, so I’m going to trust you not to run away. But the two of us will be walking very close to you on either side, so no funny business. Understood?”

I nodded, strangely humbled by the faith they had in me. If and when the authorities came knocking for my mother and brother, I knew they would not be afforded the same respect. “Thank you,” I said.

Flanked by the two men, I was escorted to the staff entrance of the store, then out into the adjacent shopping arcade. I can’t say there were no thoughts of escape in my mind, but I knew how foolish it would be to abuse the trust that had been put in me, so I came quietly. We walked out into the street and toward their car. I was placed in the back while the two Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers sat in the front.

“Where’s your car, Lewis?” I was asked.

I didn’t answer for a moment; instead I bowed my head sheepishly. “It’s over there.” I pointed to a big building on the other side of the road.

The two men looked at each other. “What do you mean, it’s over there? That’s the police station.”

I nodded. I had cheekily been parking there in order to save money. The reasons were too complicated to explain there and then, and I didn’t blame them for sharing a look that indicated their incredulity at my chutzpah. If only they knew the truth, I thought to myself. If only they knew that getting into trouble for parking my car in a West Yorkshire police lot was the least of my worries! They searched my car—a Nissan Sunny worth about £200—thoroughly, then took me to a smaller police station for processing. Not for the first time in my life, I was placed in a cell. To my astonishment, as I was escorted in, the duty officer said, “I’m sorry about the conditions.” For a moment I thought it was a sick joke, but one look on his face showed me that he meant it. And if he thought I would find the conditions unpleasant, he could not have been more wrong. There was a bed with a mattress, a steel water fountain, and a moderately clean toilet. Compared to some of the cells in which my family and I had found ourselves, this was positively luxurious.

While I was in the cell, Rachel heard a knock on the door of our house. She was having coffee with a friend and excused herself to go and open the door. It was CID. The officers explained what was going on and asked to search the house. Rachel had no option: she let them in. The officers collected all my documents and my laptop computer and took them away.

Four or five hours later I was removed from the cell and taken to an interview room.

“I’m not going to charge you,” the CID officer said. “I’m going to release you on bail. I’ve taken all your stuff, and you need to come and report to the police station on a regular basis so we know you’re still around. But I’m going to interview you now, and you have the right to a lawyer. Do you want one?”

“Yes,” I nodded.

A lawyer arrived, and I was placed in his hands. He was pleasant and friendly, and I wanted to trust him, to feel comfortable with his advice, but I found it difficult. After everything I had been through, the truth was that I trusted nobody except Rachel. I certainly didn’t trust any persons in authority, no matter whether they were Iraqi, Malaysian, or English. All sorts of possibilities ran through my head: that this man might be working with the police, that they might be trying to get me to incriminate myself. I didn’t realize that that wasn’t the way things are done in England. All the trust I might have afforded the lawyer had been sucked out of me, but I did my best to pay attention when he explained that I had the right to remain silent or to say “No comment” to any question but warned that doing so could affect me in the future.

When the interview started, I faced a barrage of questions. I admitted nothing.

I knew I wouldn’t fool anyone, but the more I thought about it the more I realized I had to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible. I would be no use to my family in jail. When the interview finished, the CID officer said, “Right, Lewis, I’m going to be investigating this further. I’ll be in touch through your lawyers.”

And I was allowed to go free. For the time being.

Suddenly, the pressure
had doubled. I wasn’t afraid of going to prison, but I was terrified of doing so before I could complete the job of getting my family out of Iraq. I knew that it was only a matter of time before I found myself in court; and when that happened, I would not be able to keep up the pretense of my denial anymore. But I simply didn’t have the money to pay anybody to smuggle my mother and brother all the way to the UK. There was no way I could risk them being in Baghdad while I was in jail, however. So in conjunction with Saad, I arranged for them to flee.

They departed under cover of night, leaving the little house in Al-Mansour that had been their home for so long. They traveled north to Mosul and remained there for a while, not exactly safe, but unknown to the authorities in that town and farther removed at least from the risk of being dragged back into Abu Ghraib. I sent them what money I could to subsist. And while the case against me was being established in England, Saad and I carried on, working hard to arrange for them to be sent farther north, into Kurdistan and eventually Turkey. The situation was far from ideal—I wouldn’t be able to rest easy until they were by my side—but it was a start.

Finally the day came, as I knew it must, on which I was charged. A trial date was set. My lawyer told me I had two options: to plead not guilty and deny all the charges or to plead guilty and claim mitigating circumstances. I asked what the worst punishment I could expect to receive was if I pleaded guilty. Two years in prison, I was told, and a deportation order. The prison sentence I could endure; the deportation could spell death to me, but it was a risk I was going to have to run: I had never intended to deny what I had done, and denial would have been pointless in any case. The evidence was all there. I had to hope that I would receive more lenient treatment from my judge than my family had received from theirs in Iraq.

I gathered together as much evidence as I could—receipts from the fine I had to pay in Malaysia and the like—to show where the William Hill money had gone. I wanted to show that I had not squandered the £37,000 on revelry but rather had used it to save the people I loved from torture and worse. I made a statement and so did my sister. I dug out records of telephone calls to Iraq and to shady people-smugglers. I even made a plea to William Hill that I would repay the money—I didn’t know how I would be able to, but perhaps I would find a way. I amassed all the mitigating evidence I could put my hands on, but in the end I knew it would come down to the sympathy of one man: the judge who was trying my case. He would decide my fate, and as my family was still relying on me, he would also decide the fate of those two faceless refugees so many miles away.

When my trial date was set, it seemed a long way off, but it arrived with inexorable speed. The lawyers for the prosecution and the representative from William Hill avoided my eye as, three years after my return from Malaysia, I took my place in the dock and waited for these men to argue the rights and wrongs of what I had done. When the lawyers for the prosecution made their case, I felt like screaming at them. “What would
you
have done?” I wanted to ask them. “Picture your own mother being beaten for no crime greater than trying to live her life quietly. What would
you
have done?” But I kept quiet and hoped that my story would speak for itself.

The judge was inscrutable as he listened to the case. I spent my time examining his face, looking for any sign of shock or sympathy, but I could see none. He simply listened, impassively, directing the court and asking the occasional question but otherwise showing no emotion whatsoever. Silently I begged him to give me some sign, some indication of how he was going to deal with me, but he was aloof and professional. I would have to wait until the verdict.

When the time came, the court fell silent. “Stand up, Mr. Alsamari,” the judge intoned.

I did as I was told. And then he started his summing-up. He recited the charges in such a way as to make them sound premeditated in the extreme: “You stole or adapted to your own use the sums of, in total, £37,000 from your employers by effectively falsifying records by access to what was thought to be a secure system on the computer. You pleaded guilty, but on a basis which is wholly exceptional, and which is set out at length by your learned counsel in mitigation, and I need not repeat it.”

I bowed my head as I listened. He did not sound remotely impressed.

“I have no doubt whatsoever,” the judge continued solemnly, “that it is a true story by virtue of the documents I have seen, and obviously from my own general knowledge.”

There was a pause before he continued. I glanced around the courtroom to see that everyone was looking at him with a rapt expression, hanging on every word he said.

“This offense for you is a tragedy. You have lost your good character, and you are an intelligent and hardworking individual who, apart from this incident, has an exemplary character.”

I held my breath.

“It is clearly an offense, involving, as it does, breach of trust, the danger that others would be blamed for what you had done, working in the same department, that justifies a custodial sentence. I am asked to draw back from that and pass upon you a community sentence because, aside from anything else, a custodial sentence, whether suspended or actual, will affect your citizenship application, and in one sense rightly so. I have listened very carefully to the mitigation on the basis of your plea, and given you credit for that plea, and I have read the many documents which have been referred to in court both from your family and from others. This is, in my experience, a unique mitigation. And I say this: that I cannot begin to imagine what it is like to have your family living within a regime which has no contemplation of human rights…and where the only way that you have to help the rest of your family escape is to bribe corrupt officials with money which you do not have. The knowledge that you had at that time, together with the depression you were suffering from—as I say, I cannot begin to imagine what that is like, and the dilemma that faces you.”

As I heard his words, I slowly began to realize that this man was on my side. For the first time ever, it seemed, a person in a position of real authority understood what we had been through and thought of us as human beings. I wanted to smile, but the smile would not come, pushed away instead by the tears that I felt welling up in my eyes. Tears of relief, and of sorrow too for my mother, who was not there to hear what was being said. Suddenly I became aware of the fact that many of the eyes in the courtroom were now on me, but it didn’t matter. And it didn’t stop me weeping.

The judge then announced what was to be done with me: “In the circumstances, the sentence that I propose to pass is the maximum one that I can impose on a suspended basis. It is two years, and it will last for two years. I could, as part of my duties today, make a recommendation for deportation. I do not do so, for obvious reasons. I know my sentence will affect your citizenship application and, as I have said already, it is right that it should. I cannot, in view of the serious nature of this matter, mitigate my judgment any further, but, as I have indicated, I do believe that the interests of justice demand in these particular and unique circumstances that the sentence I impose be suspended.

“Understand this: that if you commit any offense punishable by imprisonment within the next two years this sentence can, in whole or in part, be activated and you will then serve it. Do you understand that?”

Through my tears I replied simply: “Yes.”

The judge went on to say that he did not propose to make an order for me to repay the money to William Hill. That matter was for them to pursue in the civil courts. They never did.

I stepped down from the dock, tears still in my eyes. I wasn’t pleased with what I had done—all I had ever wanted to do was work hard and make a life for myself and my family by honest means. That opportunity had been taken from me, and I had fully expected to pay the price for it.

As it was, I felt humbled by the leniency that had been shown to me. Leniency that my past had shaped me not to expect.

In the months
that followed my trial, the judge’s warning rang in my ears: “If you commit any offense punishable by imprisonment within the next two years this sentence can, in whole or in part, be activated and you will then serve it.” I had no doubt that he meant what he said, and I knew I had to walk the line carefully if my mother and my brother were to benefit from my help. The need for caution didn’t dampen my enthusiasm to be reunited with them, however; if anything, it strengthened it.

It took a long time to spirit my mother and brother out of Turkey; and in the months and years that followed the trial, they moved about constantly, always attempting to keep one step ahead of any suspicious officials who might try to pay unwanted attention to their bogus Iraqi documents. I knew that, having left Iraq, they were free from torture and brutality, but they couldn’t rest easy until they could claim asylum in a place of safety, for the threat of deportation was always hanging over them. To my exasperation, the route that my sister had taken became closed to me when the smuggler who had arranged it disappeared—I don’t know where—and so once more it was left to me to find a new way to enable my mother and brother to finish the final leg of their journey.

My newfound trust in the British system inspired me to pursue their claim for asylum through the proper channels. I started liaising with members of Parliament (MPs), telling them our story and seeing if they could persuade the Home Office to grant us the right to family reunion; but despite the fact that the MPs had the ability to exercise their discretion to do so, they refused. As the months of red tape turned to years, I became increasingly frustrated as gradually it became more obvious that my mother and brother would never make it to England if they didn’t arrive at the border and claim asylum for themselves.