Jack Laurence

So they needed a bearing.

And Nigel had found one in the sky.

So the first attempt was a failure and they'd gotten away with it by the skin of their teeth.

When Nigel wakes up the following morning, he goes back to the toilet and does what he needs to do to make that hole bigger.

He removes another bar, covers up the hole as best he can and heads back to his room to tell Amanda they're good to try again.

Fuck you and your logic.

No, yes.

Nigel and Amanda had just made it to the local mosque with seconds to spare.

Of course, Nigel had spent his captivity not just watching, he'd been learning, learning Somali, fragments of it anyway, enough to be understood in a moment of crisis.

And of course, learning something else, something that in this particular moment might actually carry more weight than any language.

He'd learned the Shahada.

The Shahada is the Muslim profession of faith, the most sacred statement in Islam.

It is whispered into the ear of every newborn Muslim child as the first words they hear.

And it is the words a Muslim strives to say as the last in their life.

But you might still be thinking, why a mosque?

The captors were motivated by an extreme interpretation of Islam.

So why would running toward a mosque feel like running towards safety rather than straight back into danger?

Well, the honest answer, of course, is they didn't know for sure that it would.

They had no idea who was inside, no idea whether the imam would help them or hand them straight back.

No idea whether the congregation would see two Western faces burst through the door and reach for a phone.