Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [227]
As an army officer al-Islambouli was spared the searches which Sadat’s security inflicted on other ranks, who were supposed to surrender their firing pins and live rounds for the day. No checks were made to see that this had been done, although the orders had certainly been given. This laxity enabled al-Islambouli to smuggle ammunition and grenades provided by Faraj into his quarters concealed in a duffle bag. He also pulled rank to bring three assassins dressed as soldiers into his barracks; the following day they took the places of the real soldiers—to whom al-Islambouli gave a day’s leave—in his Zil truck as it towed a gun carriage across the parade ground. Only the driver did not know what was going on when al-Islambouli grabbed the handbrake as the truck neared the reviewing stand. He and his accomplices dismounted, removing the safety catches from their weapons.
There, Sadat, his ministers, visiting dignitaries and the 150 men—deployed in concentric groups—supposedly protecting him were distracted by the roaring jets of an air force fly-past. Sadat was dressed in a natty Prussian-style uniform which had arrived from a London tailor the day before. He refused to don a bullet-proof vest, claiming that it would spoil the tunic’s line. Besides, as he said when he told his guards to keep their distance: ‘Please go away—I am with my sons,’ meaning the massed soldiery. When Sadat caught sight of five men running towards him, he stood up, ready with a salute, inadvertently providing them with a clear target. The five hurled grenades, which sent the Egyptian elite reeling, and then, reaching the bottom of the reviewing stand, unleashed about thirty-five seconds of sustained fire from automatic weapons delivered from a range of about fifteen metres. Despite the efforts of the defence minister, who tried to shield his president, bullets tore into Sadat’s chest and neck causing massive blood loss. Incredulous at this fate, Sadat’s last words were ‘Mish Maaqool, Mish Maaqool’ or ‘impossible, impossible’. Al-Islambouli, whose shots finished off Sadat, repeatedly shouted, ‘My name is Khalid Islambouli, I have slain Pharaoh, and I do not fear death!’ He did not bother to kill Mubarak too, the self-effacing vice-president. One assassin was killed by security officers, and the rest were wounded and captured.
The plot to take over Cairo, starting with the television centre, unravelled as the captured assassins boasted how these attacks were supposed to unfold, an interpretation probably over-indulgent of the restraint of their interrogators. In the south there was a four-day seizure of parts of downtown Asyut, which ended abruptly when the government sent in paratroopers. Sadat’s killers and more than three hundred radical Islamist defendants were tried in a court erected in Cairo’s Exhibition Grounds. The surviving terrorists gave reasons for the assassination. They spoke of the ‘decadence’ represented by alcohol and discotheques, and the dishonouring contempt Sadat had expressed for women dressed in ‘tents’. One mentioned the example of the Iranian Revolution and the need to create a Sunni counterweight. There was one exception to the death sentences passed on the main defendants. Lawyers for Abdel Rahman successfully dissociated their client from specific injunctions to harm or kill either Copts or Sadat, while the blind sheikh himself passionately denounced attempts to relativise an immutable Islam so as to conform with modern Western mores. Incredibly, he was acquitted by a court which knew that what he was saying would have been well received by most of the ulema, even though one of Mubarak’s first acts had been to get the heads of Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar university, the Arab world’s Oxford, to condemn