The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [31]
The defendants chant, “The army of Mohammed will return, and we will defeat the Jews!”
The camera captures one particularly wild-eyed defendant in a green caftan as he extends his arms through the bars of the cage, screams, and then faints into the arms of a fellow prisoner. Zawahiri calls out the names of several prisoners who, he says, died as a result of torture. “So where is democracy?” he shouts. “Where is freedom? Where is human rights? Where is justice? Where is justice? We will never forget! We will never forget!”
Zawahiri’s allegations of torture were later substantiated by forensic medical reports, which noted six injuries in various places on his body resulting from assaults with “a solid instrument.” Zawahiri later testified in a case brought against Intelligence Unit 75, which had conducted the prison interrogations. He was supported by the testimony of one of the intelligence officers, who confessed that he witnessed Zawahiri in the prison, “his head shaved, his dignity completely humiliated, undergoing all sorts of torture.” The officer went on to say that he had been in the interrogation room when another prisoner was brought into the chamber, chained hand and foot. The interrogators were trying to get Zawahiri to confess his involvement in the Sadat assassination. When the other prisoner said, “How would you expect him to confess when he knows the penalty is death?” Zawahiri replied, “The death penalty is more merciful than torture.”
THE TRIAL DRAGGED ON for three years. Sometimes the defendants would go every day, but then more than a month might pass before they returned to the improvised courtroom. They were from various groups, and many had not even known of the others’ existence before they found themselves locked up together. They naturally began to conspire. While some eagerly talked about rebuilding, there were also intensive discussions among the prisoners about the dismaying fact that so many of them had been arrested, the movement so quickly betrayed. “We were defeated, and so we became lost,” Zawahiri admitted to one of his prison mates. They spent many days considering why the underground operations had failed and how they might have succeeded. “Ayman told me that he hadn’t wanted the [Sadat] assassination to take place,” Montassir al-Zayyat, his fellow prisoner and biographer, recalled. “He thought they should have waited and plucked the regime from the roots through a military coup. He was not that bloodthirsty.”
His education, family background, and relative wealth made Zawahiri a notable figure. Every other day, a driver arrived with food from his family, which Zawahiri distributed among the other prisoners. He also helped out in the prison hospital.
During this time, Zawahiri came face-to-face with Egypt’s best-known Islamist, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who had also been charged as a conspirator in the Sadat assassination. A strange and forceful man, blinded by diabetes in childhood but blessed with a stirring, resonant voice, Sheikh Omar had risen in Islamic circles because of his eloquent denunciations of Nasser, who had tossed him in jail for eight months without charges. After Nasser’s death, the blind sheikh’s influence increased, especially in Upper Egypt, where he taught theology at the Asyut branch of al-Azhar University. He developed a following among the students and became the leader of the Islamic Group. Some of the young Islamists were financing their activism by shaking down Coptic Christians, who made up perhaps 10 percent of the Egyptian population but who included many shopkeepers and small-business owners. On a number of occasions, the young radicals stormed into Coptic weddings and robbed the guests. The theology of jihad requires a fatwa—a religious ruling—in order to consecrate actions that would otherwise be considered criminal. Sheikh Omar obligingly issued fatwas that countenanced the slaughter of Christians and the plunder of Coptic jewelry stores, on the premise that a state of war existed between Christians and Muslims.
After Sadat finally