He wasn't supposed to live, and the way he tells the story today, this "suicide bomber" wasn't quite ready to die. Twenty-one-year-old Ahmed Abdullah al-Shayea had come to Iraq from Saudi Arabia to join the infamous terrorist known as Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi in a holy war against the American infidels. On Christmas morning, 2004, he got his first assignment, to park a tanker truck full of explosives near the high walls around the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad. He didn't know that four fellow terrorists in a Jeep Cherokee following a safe distance behind held the remote-control trigger. When they pushed it, an explosion thundered across the city, killing 10 Iraqi policemen. But al-Shayea, unlike scores of other bombers who've been vaporized beyond recognition, was blown through the windshield and, against all odds, survived.
Taken to a hospital with third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body, al-Shayea was thought to be just another bystander wounded in the blast. But when police got a tip the second week in January that men were willing to offer money to get him out, or kill him, the cops got interested. If terrorists wanted him, so did they. "Our intelligence agents kidnapped him from the hospital," says Brig. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, deputy minister of the Interior for intelligence affairs. Speaking to NEWSWEEK at his heavily guarded headquarters in Baghdad last week, Kamal described the scene. Al-Shayea was brought into the office swathed in bandages and propped up on a makeshift seat without a back. A pillow was put on his lap to ease the pain of his burned arms. Then the interrogators began their questioning, threatening to hand al-Shayea to the Americans, and at one point putting him on the phone with his father in Saudi Arabia... |