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The remote-controlled Al Qaeda assassin: How brilliant student was brainwashed into stabbing MP
By Tom Rawstorne
6th November 2010
A gaggle of sixth-form students are shown around the Palace of Westminster - their guide, the Labour MP Stephen Timms.
Pitiless: Roshonara Choudhry was jailed for 15 years after she attempted to kill MP Stephen Timms
They are from a school in his East *London constituency, and the aim of the day is to give them a glimpse into the workings of Parliament, to inspire them that, one day, if they work hard, they too could end up there.
After the tour they sit and chat for an hour. There are the usual *questions about what it is like to be an MP, the pay and the hours and that sort of thing.
But one of the teenagers keeps asking about the war in Iraq. Clearly critical, she wants to know why Mr Timms supported it and voted for it, going on and on about it until her fellow pupils start to squirm in their seats.
Among their number is a girl by the name of Roshonara Choudhry. A well-behaved, straight-As pupil, she feels distinctly uneasy about the confrontation.
She would later recall: At the time I was *thinking that she should be quiet and that she was embarrassing herself. I didnt say anything to support her, I just sat there feeling embarrassed.
'I guess I respected her for having the guts to say all these things to his face but I wasnt brave enough to say anything, I just sat quietly.
Three years later, on May 14 of this year, the shy student and the *politician would cross paths again. This time, the venue was Mr Timms constituency surgery and Choudhry was armed with a knife.
With a smile on her face she approached the MP as though to shake his hand.
Removing the three-inch razor-sharp blade from her bag, she then stabbed him twice.
She aimed at his stomach because she knew it was a soft part of his body and wounds inflicted there would most likely be fatal. And Choudhry was very nearly proved right.
Moment of terror: Choudhry, captured on CCTV at the MP's surgery, produces a knife, circled, as she prepares to stab her victim
It was only thanks to prompt *medical *intervention and the fact Choudhry was disarmed before she could stab him again that he survived.
When she was arrested, the 21-year-old calmly told detectives that she wanted to kill Mr Timms to punish him for backing the war with Iraq.
To reiterate: just three years *separated the two meetings. In that time, Choudhry had been transformed from an embarrassed teenager with little interest in politics or religion to a cold-hearted assassin willing to *murder, in the name of Al Qaeda, a man who had gone out of his way to show her kindness and hospitality.
What on earth can have happened in those intervening years?
This week it was a question at the centre of Choudhrys extraordinary trial at the Old Bailey. She refused to enter a plea to the attempted murder charge or to attend in person, saying that she did not recognise the jurisdiction of the court.
She also told her barrister that he was not to challenge the evidence against her. As a result, the case was done and dusted in a matter of hours.
She was sentenced to life and ordered to serve a minimum 15 years in prison. But the wider implications of the trial are still being digested.
At the hearing, details emerged of how Choudhry became radicalised by watching the teachings of extremist preachers on the internet.
One of them, the Yemen-based terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, is dubbed the *spiritual leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and is alleged to be behind the recently foiled cargo plane bomb plot. Yet his hate-filled preachings can be watched by *clicking onto YouTube.
The fact that they were able to warp Choudhrys thinking to such violent effect is deeply worrying. After all, she was an intelligent and well-*integrated member of the Muslim community. The fear is that many others will follow in her footsteps.
Victim: Labour MP Stephen Timms was lucky to survive the attack in which his liver was lacerated
Indeed, in a chillingly frank interview with detectives just hours after the stabbing, she would say of al-Awlaki: Everybody listens to him and likes him.
Although in the wake of the trial a number of the online videos that inspired Choudhry have been removed from YouTube, one website that she accessed continues to operate.
Called revolutionmuslim.com, it responded to her conviction by *publishing a list of MPs who voted in favour of the Iraq war and gives advice on finding details of constituency surgeries.
It describes Choudhry as a heroine and states: We ask Allah for her action to inspire Muslims to raise the knife of Jihaad against those who voted for the countless rapes, *murders, pillages, and torture of Muslim civilians as a direct *consequence of their vote.
Those who know Choudhry have been stunned by what she did, saying that there had been no sign she was being sucked into radical Islam.
The eldest of five children from a not particularly religious Bangladeshi family, she had grown up in East Ham, London. Her father Shohid had paid a large dowry to come to the UK and marry her mother, a British-born Bangladeshi named Nometha.
Having worked as a tailor and a taxi-driver, at the time of the attack he was unemployed and the family were reliant on benefits.
Relatives describe Choudhry as being both affectionate and hardworking, helping the family as well as being dedicated to her education.
And there can be no doubt she was academically gifted. She was fluent in Arabic, French and her parents mother tongue of Bengali, and had excelled throughout her education at Plashet School in East Ham, where she got straight As in her GCSEs.
At Newham Sixth Form College she again achieved straight As in three A-levels.
Everyone has been really nice, she would write in the college magazine of her time there. So Ive found it easy to make a lot of new friends.
While at the college she volunteered to be a learning mentor in a scheme designed to raise childrens literacy and numeracy levels.
She wanted to be a teacher and after winning a place to read English and communications at Kings College, London, would work weekends at an East London Islamic school, helping Muslim pupils with educational disadvantages.
Choudhry excelled at university, winning a number of academic prizes in her first two years.
Alan Fortune, the senior lecturer who taught Choudhry, said: She was a most talented and respected *students and was on course to achieve a first-class *honours degree.
Friends remember an individual who loved her studies and who seemed to be little interested in *matters of religion. Indeed, pictures emerged yesterday of her on a day out at Londons Madame Tussauds. One shows the bespectacled student, her head covered, smiling as she poses next to a waxwork of American superhero Spider-Man.
Weapons: The three-inch knife used to attack the MP, top, and a back-up blade carried by the Islamic extremist
She was quiet, but an incredibly good student, says Ibrahim Salha, who studied with *Choudhry. She associated with everyone. She didnt just stick to people of her own faith. Her friends were multi-ethnic. She wore a headscarf but never went on about religion.
Privately, her love of study led her to investigate her religion and as she became *radicalised, she took a conscious decision not to discuss her ever-more extreme views.
After her arrest, detectives seized Choudhrys computer, desperate to understand the path of her indoctrination. To their surprise, it became clear she had no known connection to any Islamist groups while there was also no evidence she had attended meetings or owned any potentially extremist literature. She did not even worship regularly at a mosque.
What did become clear was that she had been using the internet to access extremist material.
In November 2009, Choudhry began downloading more than 100 hours of sermons and lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki in which he preached the need for violent action to combat the atrocities of the West against Muslims around the world.
He has claimed: Assassinations, bombings, and acts of arson are all legitimate forms of revenge against a system that relishes the sacrilege of Islam in the name of freedom.
In interviews with police, Choudhry explained how she had stumbled across his *teachings on YouTube.
She said: I wasnt searching for him, I just came across him.
He explains things really *comprehensively and in an interesting way so I thought I could learn a lot from him.
I was also surprised at how *little I knew about my *religion so that motivated me to learn more.
Choudhry would watch two of the lectures a day and finished the complete set in the first week of May, days before the attack.
Choudhry revealed that at the time of the Iraq war she did not have particularly strong feelings about the conflict. The same held true when she met Mr Timms for the first time, on that tour of Parliament.
But she said that had changed when she had learned, via the lectures of another cleric, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, on the internet, that as a Muslim she had an obligation to defend the people of Iraq.
She said: When a Muslim land is attacked it becomes obligatory on every man, woman and child and even slave to go out and fight and defend the land and the Muslims.
At around the same time, Choudhry quit university. There were just a *matter of weeks to go before she *completed her degree and yet she had reached the conclusion that staying there was unIslamic.
She set about planning the attacks. She entered Mr Timms name into Google and found a website that records the voting record of individual MPs.
She said: He very strongly agreed with the invasion of Iraq and they (the website) worked out all his votes related to that and it came to something like 99.9 per cent support or something like that. How did that make you feel, Choudhry was asked?
That made me feel angry because the whole Iraq war is just based on lies and he voted strongly for everything as though he had no mercy, she said. I just felt like if he could treat the Iraqi people so *mercilessly, then why should I show him any mercy?
What made her think that it was her place to go and stab him? Because Im a Muslim and all Muslims are brothers and sisters. So if he attacked them, then hes likely to attack me too.
Having selected Mr Timms, the MP for East Ham, as her target, she set about her *business with clinical efficiency.
She made an appointment to see him at 2.45pm on May 14 at his surgery at Beckton Globe community centre, specifying that she must see the MP.
She packed two specially-bought knives into her bag, one with a 3in blade and one with a 5in blade in case one of them snapped during the attack.
Then she travelled to the *NatWest bank and *emptied her bank accounts, paying off her student loan so that her family would not be liable for it, at the same time ensuring that the British state could not seize her money after her arrest.
At the surgery, Choudhry was called to Mr Timms at 3pm. She walked around the desk and extended her left hand to greet him. As she did so, she produced a knife in her right hand and stabbed him in the abdomen. She then thrust the knife at him again as he tried to ward off the blow.
Mr Timms said: I thought she must have been coming to shake my hand. She looked friendly, she was smiling.
I was a little puzzled because a Muslim woman dressed in that way would not normally be willing to shake a mans hand, still less to take the *initiative to do so.
She stabbed me twice and after that, I did retreat. I retreated into the toilet, which was behind where I was standing, lifted up my jumper and realised there was quite a lot of blood there.
When subsequently asked what she had been trying to do, Choudhry replied: I was trying to kill him.
She later added: I wasnt going to stop stabbing him until someone made me. Mr Timms was taken to the Royal London Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery, having *suffered lacerations to the left lobe of the liver and a perforation to the stomach.
The injuries were potentially life-threatening, but he was released after five days and has since made a full recovery.
Choudhry, who appeared by videolink during the hearing, has shown no remorse. When she was sentenced she was seen to smile as the judge, Mr Justice Cooke, told her: You said you ruined the rest of your life. You said it was worth it. You said you wanted to be a martyr.
He went on to tell Choudhry that he hoped she would come to understand the distorted nature of her thinking and repent.
It is a hope that every right-minded person has to cling on to.
By Tom Rawstorne
6th November 2010
A gaggle of sixth-form students are shown around the Palace of Westminster - their guide, the Labour MP Stephen Timms.
Pitiless: Roshonara Choudhry was jailed for 15 years after she attempted to kill MP Stephen Timms
They are from a school in his East *London constituency, and the aim of the day is to give them a glimpse into the workings of Parliament, to inspire them that, one day, if they work hard, they too could end up there.
After the tour they sit and chat for an hour. There are the usual *questions about what it is like to be an MP, the pay and the hours and that sort of thing.
But one of the teenagers keeps asking about the war in Iraq. Clearly critical, she wants to know why Mr Timms supported it and voted for it, going on and on about it until her fellow pupils start to squirm in their seats.
Among their number is a girl by the name of Roshonara Choudhry. A well-behaved, straight-As pupil, she feels distinctly uneasy about the confrontation.
She would later recall: At the time I was *thinking that she should be quiet and that she was embarrassing herself. I didnt say anything to support her, I just sat there feeling embarrassed.
'I guess I respected her for having the guts to say all these things to his face but I wasnt brave enough to say anything, I just sat quietly.
Three years later, on May 14 of this year, the shy student and the *politician would cross paths again. This time, the venue was Mr Timms constituency surgery and Choudhry was armed with a knife.
With a smile on her face she approached the MP as though to shake his hand.
Removing the three-inch razor-sharp blade from her bag, she then stabbed him twice.
She aimed at his stomach because she knew it was a soft part of his body and wounds inflicted there would most likely be fatal. And Choudhry was very nearly proved right.
Moment of terror: Choudhry, captured on CCTV at the MP's surgery, produces a knife, circled, as she prepares to stab her victim
It was only thanks to prompt *medical *intervention and the fact Choudhry was disarmed before she could stab him again that he survived.
When she was arrested, the 21-year-old calmly told detectives that she wanted to kill Mr Timms to punish him for backing the war with Iraq.
To reiterate: just three years *separated the two meetings. In that time, Choudhry had been transformed from an embarrassed teenager with little interest in politics or religion to a cold-hearted assassin willing to *murder, in the name of Al Qaeda, a man who had gone out of his way to show her kindness and hospitality.
What on earth can have happened in those intervening years?
This week it was a question at the centre of Choudhrys extraordinary trial at the Old Bailey. She refused to enter a plea to the attempted murder charge or to attend in person, saying that she did not recognise the jurisdiction of the court.
She also told her barrister that he was not to challenge the evidence against her. As a result, the case was done and dusted in a matter of hours.
She was sentenced to life and ordered to serve a minimum 15 years in prison. But the wider implications of the trial are still being digested.
At the hearing, details emerged of how Choudhry became radicalised by watching the teachings of extremist preachers on the internet.
One of them, the Yemen-based terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, is dubbed the *spiritual leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and is alleged to be behind the recently foiled cargo plane bomb plot. Yet his hate-filled preachings can be watched by *clicking onto YouTube.
The fact that they were able to warp Choudhrys thinking to such violent effect is deeply worrying. After all, she was an intelligent and well-*integrated member of the Muslim community. The fear is that many others will follow in her footsteps.
Victim: Labour MP Stephen Timms was lucky to survive the attack in which his liver was lacerated
Indeed, in a chillingly frank interview with detectives just hours after the stabbing, she would say of al-Awlaki: Everybody listens to him and likes him.
Although in the wake of the trial a number of the online videos that inspired Choudhry have been removed from YouTube, one website that she accessed continues to operate.
Called revolutionmuslim.com, it responded to her conviction by *publishing a list of MPs who voted in favour of the Iraq war and gives advice on finding details of constituency surgeries.
It describes Choudhry as a heroine and states: We ask Allah for her action to inspire Muslims to raise the knife of Jihaad against those who voted for the countless rapes, *murders, pillages, and torture of Muslim civilians as a direct *consequence of their vote.
Those who know Choudhry have been stunned by what she did, saying that there had been no sign she was being sucked into radical Islam.
The eldest of five children from a not particularly religious Bangladeshi family, she had grown up in East Ham, London. Her father Shohid had paid a large dowry to come to the UK and marry her mother, a British-born Bangladeshi named Nometha.
Having worked as a tailor and a taxi-driver, at the time of the attack he was unemployed and the family were reliant on benefits.
Relatives describe Choudhry as being both affectionate and hardworking, helping the family as well as being dedicated to her education.
And there can be no doubt she was academically gifted. She was fluent in Arabic, French and her parents mother tongue of Bengali, and had excelled throughout her education at Plashet School in East Ham, where she got straight As in her GCSEs.
At Newham Sixth Form College she again achieved straight As in three A-levels.
Everyone has been really nice, she would write in the college magazine of her time there. So Ive found it easy to make a lot of new friends.
While at the college she volunteered to be a learning mentor in a scheme designed to raise childrens literacy and numeracy levels.
She wanted to be a teacher and after winning a place to read English and communications at Kings College, London, would work weekends at an East London Islamic school, helping Muslim pupils with educational disadvantages.
Choudhry excelled at university, winning a number of academic prizes in her first two years.
Alan Fortune, the senior lecturer who taught Choudhry, said: She was a most talented and respected *students and was on course to achieve a first-class *honours degree.
Friends remember an individual who loved her studies and who seemed to be little interested in *matters of religion. Indeed, pictures emerged yesterday of her on a day out at Londons Madame Tussauds. One shows the bespectacled student, her head covered, smiling as she poses next to a waxwork of American superhero Spider-Man.
Weapons: The three-inch knife used to attack the MP, top, and a back-up blade carried by the Islamic extremist
She was quiet, but an incredibly good student, says Ibrahim Salha, who studied with *Choudhry. She associated with everyone. She didnt just stick to people of her own faith. Her friends were multi-ethnic. She wore a headscarf but never went on about religion.
Privately, her love of study led her to investigate her religion and as she became *radicalised, she took a conscious decision not to discuss her ever-more extreme views.
After her arrest, detectives seized Choudhrys computer, desperate to understand the path of her indoctrination. To their surprise, it became clear she had no known connection to any Islamist groups while there was also no evidence she had attended meetings or owned any potentially extremist literature. She did not even worship regularly at a mosque.
What did become clear was that she had been using the internet to access extremist material.
In November 2009, Choudhry began downloading more than 100 hours of sermons and lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki in which he preached the need for violent action to combat the atrocities of the West against Muslims around the world.
He has claimed: Assassinations, bombings, and acts of arson are all legitimate forms of revenge against a system that relishes the sacrilege of Islam in the name of freedom.
In interviews with police, Choudhry explained how she had stumbled across his *teachings on YouTube.
She said: I wasnt searching for him, I just came across him.
He explains things really *comprehensively and in an interesting way so I thought I could learn a lot from him.
I was also surprised at how *little I knew about my *religion so that motivated me to learn more.
Choudhry would watch two of the lectures a day and finished the complete set in the first week of May, days before the attack.
Choudhry revealed that at the time of the Iraq war she did not have particularly strong feelings about the conflict. The same held true when she met Mr Timms for the first time, on that tour of Parliament.
But she said that had changed when she had learned, via the lectures of another cleric, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, on the internet, that as a Muslim she had an obligation to defend the people of Iraq.
She said: When a Muslim land is attacked it becomes obligatory on every man, woman and child and even slave to go out and fight and defend the land and the Muslims.
At around the same time, Choudhry quit university. There were just a *matter of weeks to go before she *completed her degree and yet she had reached the conclusion that staying there was unIslamic.
She set about planning the attacks. She entered Mr Timms name into Google and found a website that records the voting record of individual MPs.
She said: He very strongly agreed with the invasion of Iraq and they (the website) worked out all his votes related to that and it came to something like 99.9 per cent support or something like that. How did that make you feel, Choudhry was asked?
That made me feel angry because the whole Iraq war is just based on lies and he voted strongly for everything as though he had no mercy, she said. I just felt like if he could treat the Iraqi people so *mercilessly, then why should I show him any mercy?
What made her think that it was her place to go and stab him? Because Im a Muslim and all Muslims are brothers and sisters. So if he attacked them, then hes likely to attack me too.
Having selected Mr Timms, the MP for East Ham, as her target, she set about her *business with clinical efficiency.
She made an appointment to see him at 2.45pm on May 14 at his surgery at Beckton Globe community centre, specifying that she must see the MP.
She packed two specially-bought knives into her bag, one with a 3in blade and one with a 5in blade in case one of them snapped during the attack.
Then she travelled to the *NatWest bank and *emptied her bank accounts, paying off her student loan so that her family would not be liable for it, at the same time ensuring that the British state could not seize her money after her arrest.
At the surgery, Choudhry was called to Mr Timms at 3pm. She walked around the desk and extended her left hand to greet him. As she did so, she produced a knife in her right hand and stabbed him in the abdomen. She then thrust the knife at him again as he tried to ward off the blow.
Mr Timms said: I thought she must have been coming to shake my hand. She looked friendly, she was smiling.
I was a little puzzled because a Muslim woman dressed in that way would not normally be willing to shake a mans hand, still less to take the *initiative to do so.
She stabbed me twice and after that, I did retreat. I retreated into the toilet, which was behind where I was standing, lifted up my jumper and realised there was quite a lot of blood there.
When subsequently asked what she had been trying to do, Choudhry replied: I was trying to kill him.
She later added: I wasnt going to stop stabbing him until someone made me. Mr Timms was taken to the Royal London Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery, having *suffered lacerations to the left lobe of the liver and a perforation to the stomach.
The injuries were potentially life-threatening, but he was released after five days and has since made a full recovery.
Choudhry, who appeared by videolink during the hearing, has shown no remorse. When she was sentenced she was seen to smile as the judge, Mr Justice Cooke, told her: You said you ruined the rest of your life. You said it was worth it. You said you wanted to be a martyr.
He went on to tell Choudhry that he hoped she would come to understand the distorted nature of her thinking and repent.
It is a hope that every right-minded person has to cling on to.
