The bench

The following is a true story. It reconstructs dialogue and events on the basis of testimony in police and court transcripts, as well as audio and video recordings and CCTV images, which were part of public trial proceedings.

It was produced in collaboration with the Financial Times, who ran a shortened edit of the definitive and uncut version below.

AFTER MIDNIGHT, IN THE EARLY HOURS OF FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 2023, A DIRTY BLUE car parked outside St. James’s hospital in Leeds.

The car was filled up to its windows with junk. Empty bottles of Coke. Dented cans of Pepsi, Red Bull and Monster Energy. Empty KFC and Burger King wrappers. An egg box, binoculars, an inhaler and countless other unidentifiable objects.

Mohammad Farooq sat behind the steering wheel in the cold and dark, surrounded by his mess. His phone was in his hand. He was 27, overweight and round-faced, with black hair shaved neatly at the sides and swept over on top. His heart was pounding, and breathing took effort. It was, he decided, time to show them.

At 12:53 a.m. he sent a carefully composed message to a senior nurse on St. James’ acute assessment unit. “I’ve placed a pressure cooker on J28. It will detonate in one hour. Let’s see how many lives you will save.”

He had read ISIS terror manuals that suggested causing an evacuation, then setting off a bomb, or stabbing or shooting those that emerged. He watched out of the window and waited for the sirens and the fear that he craved.

The complex, a 25-acre maze of red-brick and glass buildings, was dark and gently frosting over. Inside, staff attended to a thousand or so patients. Lives began and ended. Those who could sleep, slept. Smokers emerged into the cold to smoke. But there was no sign of alarm. Nobody was wheeled out. The hospital had, unbeknown to Mohammad, evacuated the ward internally.

He recorded some bomb warnings on his phone, but didn’t send them. He moved his car closer to the Gledhow Wing of the hospital. At about 1:45 a.m. he got out to use a vending machine and the toilet. All the while, his frustration grew.

At about 2:10 a.m. he opened the back of the car, and awkwardly lifted out a heavy, holdall-sized grey bag. He walked towards Gledhow, a late 1970s brick block with a long beige awning over two sets of doors and a non-emergency ambulance bay. Without really knowing why, he aimed for the more secluded side entrance, next to the ambulance bay.

He stepped into the harsh white lights under the awning and put the bag down by the automatic doors, which slid open with a whir. He moved forward a couple of steps, to where the brick paving had been worn away, and lit a cigarette. The smoke filled his lungs, but no calm followed. A sign over his left shoulder read “proud to be a smokefree site.” It was 2:12 a.m.

Across the street in the middle of a large roundabout designed as a tiny park with grass and shielding trees, Nathan Newby put a can of beer down on the bench where he’d been sitting. He started to walk towards Gledhow too.

Nathan was 33, with short brown hair and a light beard. He was huddled against the cold in a Nike cap, a hooded jacket and Adidas tracksuit trousers. He had a white drawstring JD Sports bag on his back. Without really knowing why, he aimed for the more secluded side entrance, next to the ambulance bay.

He was in for a lung infection, but had signed himself out for the night and spent the past few hours talking to a friend in a nearby pub. When he got back to the hospital, he found he still had thinking to do, and spent a long while sitting with his beer on the bench. He walked with his head down, preoccupied.

When he looked up he saw Mohammad standing by the doors, wearing a black jacket with a high collar, blue suit trousers, and worn black Nike trainers with red laces put in them. He had his hands in his pockets, and he was swaying back and forth, and breathing heavily. He had a grey bag behind him. Nathan thought he seemed sad. Upset, even. Like he’d got some bad news.

He decided to stop and talk to him. “Alright mate, you alright?” he said, as he walked over. The two stood facing each other outside the sliding doors. It was 2:14 a.m.

“Yeah mate, yeah,” Mohammad replied. To Nathan it felt like a conversation at a bus stop, no need for preamble, silences forgiven. He saw that Mohammad noticed the medical tape on his left hand from the intravenous line that would soon be put back in.

“Why are you in?” Mohammad asked. Nathan told him about his lung infection, and asked the same question.

“I’m just feeling a bit down,” Mohammad replied.

“Down about what?”

“I want to get them back.”

“Them,” Nathan thought. That was weird. “What have they done?” he asked.

“I’ve been working here,” Mohammad said. “Doing a course to become a nurse. For two years. But they’ve stabbed me in the back. Fucked my life up.”

“You can’t take it out on whoever is in there,” Nathan told him. “There’s a lot of people in there,” he said, thinking of the ward he was on. “A lot of poorly people.”

There was silence. Nathan felt he should keep Mohammad talking. “Anyway, have you got any family?”

“I’ve got two kids, well one on the way, and a wife.”

Nathan decided to share his own problems. Put himself down a bit to make Mohammad feel better.

“You’ve got it a lot better than me,” he said.

“Why? Why am I better than you?” Mohammad asked.

“At least you’re one step ahead of me. You’re a father and that.”

Nathan had been born with cystic fibrosis. A genetic disease that attacked his lungs, stomach, everything, over time. He’d been in and out of hospital all of his life, and that would never change. There was no cure. If he made it beyond his 50s, it would be seen as a success.

He didn’t always cope with it perfectly. Some days he just wanted to be like everyone else. There were moments where his frustration had bubbled over. But it had also given him a particular perspective. His friends and family knew he was someone who didn’t want others to suffer as he had.

“I can't have owt like you,” Nathan went on. He could see this seemed to penetrate. To find some feeling. But Mohammad’s expression soon hardened again. He kept swaying back and forwards, and Nathan noticed he was fidgeting, turning to look at his bag just behind him. His hands were still wedged in his pockets.

“Are you all right mate? You seem a bit agitated about that bag. Why are you focused on the bag?”

“Oh nowt, nowt.”

“What’s so important about it?”

“You don’t want to know. You don’t want to know.”

“Just say.”

“It’s just a bomb.” He said it like it was absolutely normal. Like he was talking about a pair of shoes.

“What?”

“Oh yeah, just a bomb.”

“A bomb. OK. What’s your plan?”

“I was going to walk through the main door, past the lifts. And then wait for the nurses to come in for their break, and then I’ll set it off and walk out.”

“Can I see it?” Nathan asked, looking at the bag again.

Mohammad’s breathing grew strained. Nathan felt maybe he shouldn’t have asked but kept going anyway. “It can’t be that important if I see,” he said, “if what you say is in there is in there.”

Mohammad turned, bent over the bag, and with one zip opened the top. Inside was what looked to Nathan like a slow cooker with a metal lid on it. There were two or three wires on the top that came out to another small piece on the side. He kept the bag open for four or five seconds, then closed it back up.

Nathan felt a surge of shock and fear. It was, somehow undoubtedly, a real bomb. The fidgeting Mohammad was doing in his pockets took on a new meaning. “Is there anything in your pockets that would blow it up?”

“No, I have to light it.”

“Let’s assume that goes off now. What would be the range?”

He pointed to a car about 50 feet away and a bin about the same distance away. “It would go to them there. And take the front of the hospital off.”

Mohammad had lied in the text message he’d sent to the ward. He still had the bomb. But it was a pressure cooker, carrying 10kg of explosive, with a fuse wired to a secondary charge to detonate it. The cooker would contain, and thus magnify, the explosion, and add shards of shrapnel. It was powerful enough to demolish a house.

Mohammad had deliberately tried to make it bigger than the two Boston Marathon bombs, also pressure cookers, which each contained 3.5kg of a similar explosive. Though those went off outside, they killed three people and injured 281, including 16 who lost a limb. Gledhow contained St. James’s maternity services, including the delivery room, neonatal and postnatal wards, and six wards for elderly patients. Dozens would die and countless more would have their lives changed forever.

Later, people asked Nathan why he didn’t run. He just said he had always handled things differently from how normal people did. He tried to take everything with a pinch of salt, including his health, because it didn’t matter what he was confronting really, only how it was inside him.

He thought about wrestling the bomb away. But he might not succeed. And Mohammad might have other concealed weapons. He thought about shouting for help, but it seemed the most likely outcome was that he’d break the trust they’d built, Mohammad would have time to light the bomb, and they’d both die at the very center of the explosion along with whoever he alerted.

A nurse emerged from Gledhow’s doors, passed them, and started smoking a cigarette about 12 feet away. Mohammad became aware of her and stopped talking. His attention was on the nurse. She looked at him. Looked at the bag. The three of them stood, connected but not connected.

Nathan started to think of himself as being in the right place at the right time. His instinct was to get this man and his bomb away from the front of the hospital, and from other people, and to keep him talking.

“My legs are hurting because we’ve been stood up for a while,” Nathan said. “My beer’s on that bench,” he said and pointed to the roundabout. “Come and sit next to me, and bring that with you.”

Mohammad picked up the bag and they walked across the road to the roundabout. The lighting changed from the harsh overhead of the Gledhow awning, to the atmospheric light posts of the park. Behind them, the nurse put out her cigarette and went inside.

Mohammad placed the bag down in front of a dark wooden bench. Nathan sat on the bench next to it, which was longer and had lighter wood. He picked up his cold can of beer. Mohammad stood in front of him and they continued to talk, breath fogging in the colder air.

It was strange, but Mohammad felt like it was Nathan who needed help from him, not the other way around. When he said about his illness, that he couldn’t have the kind of life that Mohammad took for granted, it had moved him. For a moment, Mohammad had stopped feeling angry. He found himself opening up and telling his whole story. The only time Nathan interjected was to ask questions, or to mention moments when he’d felt the same way.

Mohammad was the eldest son of a Muslim British family. He was expected to be the strongest. A leader. A provider. A great son, grandson, brother, husband and father. From the start he felt like a disappointment. His father made no secret of the fact. His disdain was verbal, and physical. He felt that was just the way his dad was.

He tried his best every day. He wasn’t stupid. But he had a blank affect that confused people, and he struggled to engage with others. He got frustrated easily. And he fixated on problems. Much later he was diagnosed with a likely autism spectrum disorder.

Wherever he went people seemed to pick on him, or take advantage of him. He’d accused two female relatives of sexual abuse. At school he was bullied so much that he couldn’t hide it from his parents any more, and had to change schools. He managed to scrape through his the rest of his education when a PE teacher helped protect him from new bullies.

He’d wanted to work with computers. It was something he had a talent for. But he could never maintain the hope necessary to finish what he had started. His Instagram account showed several attempts to start a business based on something called “ethical hacking.” He came up with different names — Netsiege, Majestic 12, Cyber Action Force — and made logos for each interspersed with inspirational quotes. “Work while they sleep. Learn while they party. Save while they spend. Live like they dream.”

He had not one friend in the world. (He had a few people he chatted to online, briefly, but they scammed him out of £300 in crypto and disappeared.) He was married, but felt ashamed to talk honestly to his wife. His two little sisters were both more successful, by his parents’ standards. By his twenties he lived in the semi-detached house next door to a family who despaired of his failures, while also treating him with the formal deference accorded to the role of elder son. He was alone, even if he was not alone.

His mother had been a social worker, and she pushed him into a job in clinical support at St. James’s, earning about £20,000 per year. The idea was that he could train as a nurse, move up the ladder, actually complete something. There were more jobs in nursing than computers, she said, and the possibility for progress.

He worked on ward J28, the acute assessment unit. It was a place for some of the saddest cases—those under 80 who suffered from conditions including alcohol withdrawal, diabetic ketoacidosis, sepsis and seizures.

But he found that he had empathy for the patients, even the ones you couldn’t really communicate with. He wanted to help them. Give them their dignity. But it felt to him that the other nurses made snide jokes at their expense, or treated them like they weren’t really people. Ganged up on them, just as he had been ganged up on. It filled him with a rage he could not explain or control.

Soon after, he felt that a senior nurse on the ward started to pick on him unfairly, that she and other managers, all women, kept setting him back on his nursing course because they felt he was not doing the work that was set. But how could he when he was under such unfair scrutiny and pressure? Eventually they told him he simply would not make it as a nurse.

Those were years he would never get back. He could not have failed again. He couldn’t accept it. He kept his failure secret from his family. It was his job to be the man of the house. Not the kind of guy who would get picked on. But he was always either angry, or turning it over in his mind: what was it about him that kept making this happen?

When he was at home he’d be on the computer, by himself, where he would not have to see anyone seeing him. He was becoming a better liar. He had unpredictable shift patterns at work, and increasingly he told his family he was working late, and drove to a car park in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by high hedges and peaceful trees, to eat junk food and scroll his phone alone. He just needed time to think. To contain all the pressure. His wife got frustrated sometimes, and asked him why he never took her out, or spent time with her. But he made excuses and brushed it off. In his mind he was protecting her from his turmoil.

He had volunteered for a cyber security team within the NHS. He bought a key logger, a small USB device that plugs in between a computer and its keyboard, and records and transmits everything typed. Before long he had access to the usernames and passwords of the women he hated most at work, as well as their personal numbers and email addresses. When his anger got too much, he bought burner SIM cards or made anonymous email addresses and sent hate-filled messages.

“I’m coming for your soul, I’ll be watching you now,” said one, to a manager. Another said “I will burn your whole world down” and was signed “Ghost Man.” He emailed one manager with the subject line “You silly whore,” telling her that he hoped her sick mother died a horrible death. Later he hacked her email account and sent her a message from herself that read: “I’m coming for you.”

He wanted a response. He wanted to see them suffer as he had suffered. He wanted them to feel small and vulnerable, as he did. He wanted to say: This is what you guys invited. I didn’t have any option left and this is what you get. He imagined the women afraid. Not laughing at him any more.

But when one nurse came up to him and asked him point blank if he was behind the hacking, he heard himself quietly denying it instead, and retreating again.

He started making excuses not to come to work and wrote a resignation letter he didn’t send. It didn't help really. He got no release, or relief, except from sitting in the car park by himself at night. His car filled with junk, like a nest. He found peace there in the glow of his phone’s screen. Google, Instagram, Reddit, forums for hackers, and—mostly—Tik Tok. His online life was entirely separate from his real one. But it felt more real.

Eventually he started saving things so he could go back to them, or making little notes on his phone. He became a version of Dr. Frankenstein, making a monster of himself from the web pages, forum postings, news articles, videos and cut-and-pasted quotes that went past in a haze of titles, and emotions.

“Panic attacks.”

“Stand up and fight back.”

“I would rather die with respect from people than die with no respect and constantly be stressed.”

“Free Palestine.”

“The cheapest blood in the world is now the blood of a Muslim.”

In January 2022, he took up smoking in the hope it would help calm him. He also bought a gun from a shop full of knives and swords called Fantasia. It was a Turkish Glock replica called an Ekol Gediz, popular among criminals because it is easy to adapt to fire live rounds using the kinds of household tools Mohammad kept in his car and garage.

The gun was blue on top, to identify it as blank-firing. He painted it black, and bought a shoulder holster. He tried firing it a couple of times in the garage, but it was really loud so he didn't do it again. He took pictures of it placed in the hospital, so he could send them as threats. But he never sent them. So he kept it in his car, alongside him as he scrolled and typed on and on.

“People say that committing suicide is a cowardly thing to do but let me tell you, it takes a lot of courage to end it all. I thought about it a few times, to be honest.”

“Oh my brothers, Jihad’s the way.”

“The Martyr has Seven Things in Store with Allah.”

“Anwar al-Awlaki.”

“Black flags.”

The searches took on a new focus. Explosives. His phone filled up with PDFs. “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mum,” by the Al-Qaeda Chef. The Anarchist Cookbook. ISIS Lone Wolf Hit List.

In late November or early December of 2022, he bought a pressure cooker and adapted it to work as a bomb. Around the same time he paid £600 in cash for three sets of fireworks. The fireworks were huge, and he had nowhere to keep them, so he spent six meditative hours a night in his car cutting them open and decanting an increasingly dangerous quantity of gunpowder into the cooker.

When he was done, he made a fuse with parts from the fireworks, and tape, and wired it into the bomb. He kept it in the back of his car when he was not working on it, in a grey bag, along with a couple of knives, a box of nails and some boxes of blank bullets. The police even stopped him a couple of times on his night drives, but they didn’t search the car.

Instead of his usual car park, his drives started to focus on RAF Menwith Hill, a listening station that is a point of particular hatred for Islamic extremists for its role in enabling British and American strikes in the middle east.

“Night vision goggles.”

“UK spies watched from Harrogate base as Al-Qaeda leader was executed.”

“ISIS confirms spy base, Menwith Hill, is a target.”

“Burger King Menwith Hill.”

He could not find a way into the base. Every night his rage and humiliation built. By early January, he felt he could not take it any more. He had a shift coming up on the night of Friday January 20. It had to end before then. He could not see their smug faces again. Couldn’t let them laugh at him any more. His baby was due soon, and that was enough pressure. He thought about breaking his faith, and drinking alcohol to get his mind off it, but he felt that would be going too far.

On Thursday, January 19, he showered at 5:00 p.m. and went out at 6:00 p.m. He sat in his usual car park alone, scrolling Tik Tok, but it brought him no rest. All he could think about was that he’d felt the same every day for so long. And it would never change. He could never say anything to the women. He didn’t have the confidence.

He smoked cigarette after cigarette, but that didn’t help. So he went to KFC and got two small pizzas and a burger. But that didn’t help either. He felt he was broken inside. By around midnight he had decided. He needed to get their respect. To show them they couldn’t do this. To take back control. He drove to the hospital.