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This Day in Alternate History Blog |
Something’s Happened In The Motorcade: The Assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser By Chris Oakley
Part 3
Summary: In the first two episodes of this series we looked back at Gamal Abdel Nasser's assassination, the worldwide reaction to his death, and the damaging effects his murder had on the morale of the Egyptian armed forces in the run-up to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. In this chapter we’ll explore how Nasser’s assassin, Mohamed el Karin, spent his two and a half years in hiding from police. ****** Being a fugitive anywhere in the world is a difficult enough proposition to begin with; doing so in a country at war is even more of a challenge. And when you live in a nation under the rule of a one-party authoritarian regime, you’re taking a severe risk of being arrested and thrown in jail for life-- perhaps even executed. Dictatorships have been known to hang or shoot people for far less serious offenses than killing the head of state. So when Mohammed el Karin went underground following his assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser, he was taking his very life in his hands. To this day people familiar with the circumstances of Nasser’s death are still surprised el Karin managed to elude the Egyptian security forces for more than two years; there were numerous instances over those two and a half years when police came within minutes, if not seconds, of getting their hands on him. El Karin himself, once he finally was caught, wrote in his prison diary that during the days immediately following his assassination of Nasser he'd lived in constant fear of being arrested and summarily shot by a firing squad. However, blending in with the denizens of Cairo's poorer quarters actually turned out to be a simpler affair than el Karin had expected. His years in the Egyptian military had taught him many valuable lessons in the art of camouflage and there were plenty of people in Cairo's working-class districts who sympathized with el Karin and sheltered him at great risk to their own lives. Some of them were themselves fugitives from justice, thus making them disinclined to do anything that might make it easier to for the government’s security forces to capture him. It was one of these other fugitives, a notorious forger wanted for counterfeiting, who helped el Karin secure the falsified papers which made it possible for him to establish his new identity under the alias Hosni al- Wahid. Although the forger had to flee Egypt within a year after meeting el Karin and was eventually killed trying to escape police pursuit in Belgium, he would be invaluable to el Karin in helping the onetime soldier-turned- presidential assassin to blend in with the other tenants of his new home. At his trial, el Karin would credit the forger with playing a substantial part in his success at keeping one step ahead of the police during his two and a half years on the run. ****** Once he had succeeded in forging his cover identity, the newly minted al-Wahid then set to work finding a living under that identity. This proved to be somewhat easier than he'd expected; before joining the army he'd worked alongside his father in a machine repair shop, and even after all these years away from it he still remembered much of what he'd learned there. He opened his own repair shop in August of 1967, with the maintenance of small industrial motors as his specialty. He ran the shop for nearly six months before an electrical fire forced him to temporarily abandon it, then reopened it a month after the fire. Once it was reopened, his business picked up right where it had left off and al-Wahid succeeded in making a high enough profit to move from his original one-room flat to a larger apartment just down the alley from his shop. Meanwhile, Egyptian police forces were at their wits end trying to locate him. From their point of view it seemed as if el Karin had vanished off the face of the earth. None of the technology used to track fugitives today was available in 1967, and even if it had been it's questionable as to whether the police could have found him any sooner than they did; the residents of the neighborhood where he had chosen to hide out were by and large reluctant to talk to investigators. It wasn't until August of 1968, over a year after Egypt's defeat in the Six-Day War, that Egyptian police investigators even began to narrow down their search. That month, homicide detectives in Cairo received an anonymous tip that a man closely resembling el Karin had been seen passing by one of the stalls in a vegetable market a half-hour's walk from the original site of el Karin's repair shop. Based on that tip, security agents began staking out the market in question in hopes he might make a return appearance. Their patience was finally rewarded in February of 1969 when one of their agents snapped a photograph of a heavily disguised el Karin leaving a tea shop in the vicinity of the market. Armed with this picture, and with a renewed sense of purpose, the investigators assigned to his case launched a comprehensive sweep of el Karin’s neighborhood looking for further evidence of his involvement in Nasser’s assassination. Their inquiries eventually led them to the home of a retired Egyptian army sergeant who had been present at the Alexandria army base inspection the day Nasser was shot.... ****** ...and he had a quite a story to tell. Even months after the fact he could still recall in vivid detail the moments leading up to and including the assassination, not to mention the assassin's face as the assassin fled the scene of the crime. The sergeant's description of the assassin matched to a substantial degree that of the last known photograph of el Karin taken before the assassination. From that point on, the security forces of Sadat’s government were in a tight race with local Cairo police personnel to see who would have the honor of bringing Gamal Abdel Nasser’s killer to justice. Unaware that his cover was being blown, el Karin continued going about his daily routine under his post-assassination identity. It would have been a relatively simple matter for Egyptian security forces to grab el Karin off the street and throw him in prison, but the head of the interior ministry was concerned that moving too prematurely to arrest el Karin might spook him into fleeing the city and seeking a new refuge elsewhere in Egypt-- or in another country, for that matter. So the police bided their time until they could be sure the moment was right to make the collar. Their patience would pay off in buckets in late September of 1969, when one of the army men who had been in the crowd the day Nasser was assassinated recognized el Karin sitting at an outdoor cafe table and identified him to police patrols making their daily rounds through Cairo's streets. On September 28th, 1969 Mohammed el Karin's two and a half years on the run from the law finally ended as agents of Egypt's national security forces arrested him outside a coffeehouse. Under armed escort he was quickly taken to a military prison and charged with Nasser's assassination; to forestall a possible attempt by angry mobs to break into the prison to exact vigilante justice on el Karin, tanks were lined up outside the prison gates to create an armored cordon around el Karin's cell block. The army also deployed teams of sharpshooters on all rooftops within a one-block radius of the prison to be sure that, as one Egyptian army colonel wryly put, el Karin wasn't kille on the way to his own funeral...
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