UAE | Heritage and Culture
Gardner keeps faith in Islam after traumatic experience
The UAE and most GCC member countries are peaceful and safe countries and have no problem with militant Islamists, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said.
- By Samir Salama, Bureau Chief
- Published: 23:50 October 9, 2007
- Image Credit: WAM
- Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed receives Frank Gardner during the majlis.
Abu Dhabi: The UAE and most GCC member countries are peaceful and safe countries and have no problem with militant Islamists, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said.
Gardner was speaking about his horrific experience at the hands of Al Qaida - which left him partly paralysed and his cameraman Simon Cumbers dead - during a majlis organised by General Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces.
He singled out Saudi Arabia, which he said "harbours extremists and militants who consider that their entire peninsula needs to be cleansed of disbelievers, or 'Kuffar', as they call them."
Gardner, who survived an attack by Al Qaida in Saudi Arabia in June 2004, said there have been periodic violent attacks against foreign and state interests in Saudi Arabia since the mid-1990s.
"However, the violence reached a new level in 2003 with suicide attacks being launched on Western and Arab expatriate housing compounds and a series of deadly bombings and shootouts as militants attacked expatriate workers and the Saudi police.
"This was a wake up-call and the authorities there have ever since exerted great efforts to tighten the noose on terrorists and change the mindset of people who consider Westerners infidels."
Gardner said he was shot in the shoulder and leg by a group of militants and, when a second team turned up, they pumped four more bullets into his body.
"I was conscious through the whole attack. I saw in the faces of the gunmen absolute hatred. They had pressed the button of violence and nothing I tried to say to them in Arabic was going to dissuade them.
"As far as they were concerned, I am a Western infidel who had come into their area and this was an opportunity to execute a Westerner as they wanted blood. But I willed myself to stay alive for the sake of my wife and two daughters.
Trouble
"The local people - very uncharacteristically for Muslims, who are normally fantastically good at helping people in trouble - stood around and just discussed me. Eventually the crowd built up, and the police turned up, no ambulance.
"They bundled me into a police car and took me to a ropey hospital. Thank God, I'd managed to get word somehow to the British Embassy, which together with the governor of Riyadh activated a kind of rescue unit for me.
"They sent a highly-qualified team of specialists from the King Faisal Hospital to rescue me. I think if they hadn't come I would've been dead about an hour later."
Despite his traumatic experience, Gardner said he had never turned against Islam or Muslims.
Medal: Mohammad honours eight journalists
General Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, honoured eight jounalists who were killed or critically injured in terrorist attacks.
The terror victims were awarded the Shaikh Zayed Medal.
They are Frank Gardner, the BBC Security Correspondent; Simon Cumbers, a BBC cameraman who was killed in a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in 2004; Atwar Bahgat, Al Arabiya TV correspondent, who was kidnapped and killed in Iraq in 2006; Jawad Kazim, also a correspondent of Al Arabiya TV, who was left partly paralysed by a terrorist attack in Iraq in 2005; Sameer Qaseer, who was killed by a car-bomb in Lebanon in 2005; Ali Al Khatib, a correspondent of Al Arabiya TV, who was reportedly killed when a US tank fired on his car in Baghdad in 2004; Mai Chediac, a Lebanese TV journalist, who had a hand and leg amputated after an attack in 2005 and Jibran Tweini, who was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 2005.
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