29/6/99

The terrorist's tale

    There was an explosion in the Old City the other day. Michael Sedgwick was the perpetrator.
    We were sitting together on the rooftop of the El-Arab Hostel inside Damascus Gate. Virtually the moment our interview ended, his cigarette lighter, heated by the broiling midday sun, blew up in our faces with a deafening bang.
    It was an astonishing coincidence, because of the story I had come to hear: Michael had been suspected of planting a terrorist bomb.
    We had a good laugh -- after checking that we weren't injured, and that our hearts hadn't stopped. Michael joked that the police would never have believed he didn't try to murder me.
    Behind his laugh, Michael was shaking. Still too fresh in his mind -- and on his nerves -- is what happened on the night of December 21, 1998.
    Walking past the New Gate on the way home, he accidentally triggered a bomb. The following morning, in Shaare Zedek Hospital, he awoke to a nightmare. "The nurse said, 'I have some bad news: you've lost a hand. You have problems with your chest. And also, you're under arrest.'"
    Doped by morphine, his left hand blown off, he found himself attached to an IV drip -- and shackled to his bed.
    "I thought, 'it's not my day.' "
    That's how Michael is. Good-humored and gentle. It is inconceivable to imagine this man as a killer. But the police -- just doing their job -- worked from the presumption that he was maimed by his own murderous intent.
    Not a victim of terrorism, but the terrorist himself.
    He's a 53-year-old immigrant from Winnipeg, Canada, born in England; he's lived here on and off since 1985; he served in the IDF. Previously, he had never been suspected of anything worse than having had a couple of beers too many. He is non-political: he couldn't even decide who to vote for. There is not one iota of hostility or hatred about him.
    However, the police were just doing their job when they arrested him, chained him (they had to make do with only three shackles), and persecuted him until they were satisfied he was innocent.
    National Insurance was just doing its job when they denied him disability payments, because they don't compensate terrorists; various doctors, lawyers and bureaucrats were just doing their jobs by frustrating him every step of the way, as Michael claims.
    The newspapers, too, were just doing their jobs, in naming him as a suspected terrorist. You can imagine how Michael felt about that.
    According to this very newspaper (also doing its job), "Police are also investigating the possibility [Sedgwick] may be connected to seven stabbing attacks on Arabs in Mea Shearim.... in what police believe is the revenge of a Jewish serial killer."

HE WAS walking by a bench just outside New Gate at 1:30 a.m., a knapsack over his shoulder. "My bag hit something, I turned quickly and saw a lady's purse on the bench. I saw it. And then it happened, a sort of white cloud engulfed me, a hot cloud. It was a bomb.
    "When the bomb went off, I ran into the middle of the road, y'know, to warn people that maybe there was another bomb. A car stopped to take me to hospital, it turned out to be three religious people, and of course, the car was covered in blood. And they got arrested for aiding and abetting me! Fortunately, they were later released. They came to visit me a few times, which was nice.
    Reeling from the shock, horror and pain, Michael was grilled.

    "I told the police exactly what happened, I answered all their questions, but they said it's impossible, it couldn't have happened this way. They kept saying, 'what's your passive hand?' And I said my left hand. And they said, 'well, why did it blow off you left hand, and not your right hand?'
    "I made the bombs here, on the roof, they said." Michael shrugs in disbelief.
    He understands the police were simply probing, on the off-chance of getting lucky. But it was harrowing for him.
    "I like to cut out pictures of people in the newspaper and put them on my wall. And the police saw this picture from the Post of Arik Sharon, a funny picture, and they said aha, you're planning to assassinate him.
    "The police joke with me. It's quite sad, really. They said that the men on the force thought I was 70 percent guilty, the women, 10 percent. Whenever I had to go to the police station, they'd say something like, 'oh, what are you doing here today? Come to confess?' It's probably just their way, I don't know."
    He was urged to fink on his terrorist accomplices. They asked if he'd been to Kiryat Arba. They asked who he was going to vote for. They suggested his girlfriend, a German Jew, was working with the long-defunct Baader Meinhof terrorist group.  They interviewed his friends in Ashdod. They questioned him under hypnosis, but his story held up.
    "When I was in hospital the police put a 24-hour guard on me. I was a suspect for a week, but they had to release me for lack of evidence. They returned my passports, but unfortunately, they were stolen that same night, and I had to call them back -- the same policemen!"
    The handcuffs were removed, but he remained in Shaare Zedek a further month. "At least I could make phone calls and have visitors. And I had visitors: Channel 1 came along, Channel 2, the newspapers, but I said no, I wasn't willing to talk about it."
    This is the first time he has.
    "I don't know why, but nobody here is interested in helping me. The total indifference is unbelievable." He said Kupat Holim, of which he is a dues-paying member, has been stonewalling him. "I don't think it has anything to do with me being a suspect. I just fell through the cracks of the bureaucracy."
    He wants a prosthesis, attention to his loss of hearing in one ear and glass removed from his chest. Half a year later, he still suffers from tintinnabulation -- "I hear a ringing sensation in my ears, it's like the sound of the bomb going off, it's a constant reminder." His hand hurts, constantly. He needs psychological treatment: "I'm sure my mental condition was affected, being chained up in a hospital bed like that."
    He wants to go to Canada to get treatment, but he's afraid to risk spending all his money on a ticket only to be turned away at the airport, as a security suspect. 
    Police Spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby later assured me that all charges had been dropped, Michael's file is closed and he's a free man.
    For somebody once suspected of being a terrorist and serial killer, Michael is quite likeable. "I always keep the stump covered with a sock. So I always wear three socks, but you can't buy them in a set of three. Well, you know how people always lose a sock? That's not a problem for me, I always need an odd number of them.
"There's some good that came out of this," he said, lifting his stump. "It attracts the women. I suppose it brings out their motherly instincts."