— black hiking shoes —
The man was part Jamaican and part English, and close to two meters tall. He spoke with a South London accent, having been born in Bromley and educated at Thomas Tallis School in Kidbrooke. He had deep set eyes and thick black hair, and there were over one hundred grams of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate and Acetone peroxideplastic high-grade plastic explosives hidden in the hollowed soles of his black hiking shoes. His name was Richard Reid.
When Richard was born his father was in prison. By the time he left school at sixteen, he was already stealing cars like his old man. He did some time for mugging. “I was not there to give him the love and affection he should have got,” his father would later say. When Richard ran into the old man at a shopping mall some years after his first arrest, Robin Reid had a word of advice for his son. Muslims treat you like a human being, he said. And they get better food in prison.
Richard took the name Abdul Raheem after his conversion at the Feltham Young Offenders Institute. A few years after that he disappeared. His mother thought he was in Pakistan. Records obtained later suggest that he was trained in Afghanistan. He resurfaced in Amsterdam, where he worked in a restaurant. From Amsterdam he went to Brussels, and from Brussels to Paris.
December was cold and dark, and the days were short. It was on the seventeenth that Richard bought a round-trip ticket to Miami, flying with American Airlines. He spent his time in Paris around the Gare du Nord, not staying in a hotel; when he arrived at the airport on December twenty-first, he looked rough.
He had no luggage. French security personnel interviewed Reid, but they could not find a reason to hold him. Having missed his flight, he returned the next day and this time successfully boarded the Boeing 767 flight.
It was a Saturday morning. There were a hundred and eighty five passengers on board. There were, as mentioned, explosives, as well as a detonator, in the soles of Richard Reid’s shoes. Once the flight was airborne, and after the in-flight meal (which Richard did not share), the smell of smoke began to waft through the cabin. A stewardess, Hermis Moutardier, discovered him trying to light a match and warned him that smoking was not allowed on board. Reid promised to stop. He picked his teeth with the blackened match instead. He had a window seat, and no-one beside him. Moments later, Moutardier returned, finding Richard bent over in his chair. She thought he was smoking. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘what are you doing?’ He did not reply. When she demanded an answer Reid turned in his seat, exposing the shoe now between his legs, a fuse, and a lit match. Moutardier grabbed him. He pushed her away. She tried to take hold of him again and he pushed her, hard, until she fell across an armrest in the next row of seats. Moutardier ran back down the plane, shouting, ‘Get him! Go!’
When Cristina Jones heard Moutardier, she ran towards the commotion. Reid’s back was turned away. Jones shouted, ‘Stop it!’ and tried to grab him. Reid turned and bit her left hand, his teeth fastening to the flesh below the thumb, not letting go. Jones screamed.
When he released her, Jones put up the tray table in the seat beside him. Passengers passed over bottles of Evian water to pour over Reid. They then used belts, headphone wires and plastic cuffs to tie him up. When, later, the FBI tried to take hold of him, they had to cut Richard out of layers of bonds.
‘I think I ought not apologize for my actions,’ Richard Reid said at his trial. ‘I am at war with your country. I’m at war with them not for personal reasons … So you can judge and I leave you to judge. And I don’t mind. This is all I have to say.’
‘You are not an enemy combatant,’ Judge William Young said. ‘You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist … We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.
‘You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders.
‘Custody, Mr. Officer. Stand him down.’
‘On the Day of Judgment,’ Reid said as he was carried away, ‘you will see in front of your Lord and my Lord and then we will know.’