Remembering the true victims

OSAMA Bin Laden was unlikely to have been thinking about Gavin Cushny when US Special Forces fired two bullets into his brain.

To the founder of Al-Qaeda, the victims of his terrorist organisation were inconsequential dots in a spray of red.

Who cares if one was a Scot? Yet Mr Cushny, a computer expert from Lewis who worked for the stockbrokers Cantor Fitzgerald and died on the 104th floor on the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 11 September, 2001, was not the only dot.

There was Christopher Newton-Carter, who called his brother at

the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park, near Forres, to say he was safe when the second plane struck the south tower and it quickly became clear he was not.

Derek Sword, 29, a banker from Dundee, and also working in the south tower was the third Scots dot on that day that will live in infamy.

So while the citizens of a rainbow of national flags died upon his command or at the inspiration of his words, it is important not to forget those whose eternal sleep is under the saltire. The God that Helen Jones believed in was one quite different from the Cosmic tyrant behind Bin Laden’s prayers. While he believed that the Almighty would not be satisfied until the entire world was under the rule of Islam, Ms Jones, who earned a First in divinity at Aberdeen University once comforted a friend upon the death of a child with the words: “any tragedy is never God’s will. The first heart to break is God’s. The first tear to be shed is always by God.” Words that were repeated at her funeral in Paisley after she was murdered by an acolyte of Bin Laden at King’s Cross tube station on 7 July, 2005.

The world was changed by Osama Bin Laden. Scotland was changed by Osama Bin Laden. It was the teachings of Bin Laden, the grainy footage and monotonous lectures that brought a second hand jeep bought through Autotrader and stacked with Calor Gas canisters picked up at B&Q careering into the front of Glasgow Airport. It was Osama Bin Laden that inspired Dr Bilal Abdulla to wear a mask of compassion and tend the sick at Scottish hospitals, all the while plotting his attempt at mass murder.

Over the past decade, Osama Bin Laden was the architect of the world in which a number of Scots were killed. The war in Afghanistan has claimed the lives of many Scots soldiers, including Corporal Jamie Kirkpatrick, 32, from Edinburgh who was shot dead by insurgent gunfire in the Nahr-e Saraj district of Helmand province.

While George W. Bush and Tony Blair made the decision to invade Iraq, it would not have happened were it not for 9/11.

The family of a dog handler killed in Afghanistan has been presented with his campaign medal alongside his squadron colleagues. Lance Corporal Liam Tasker, 26, from Kirkcaldy, was killed on 1 March when he was on patrol in Helmand Province with Springer spaniel Theo.

A SCOTTISH bomb disposal expert was shot dead by insurgent gunfire in Afghanistan when his unit came under fire, an inquest heard. Corporal Jamie Kirkpatrick, 32, from Edinburgh, was on operations in the Nahr-e Saraj district of Helmand province when he was shot in the head by the single high-velocity round on 27 June last year.

THE mother of a Scottish woman killed in the deadliest of the 7/7 terror attacks said the bombing had “deprived the world of a unique young woman”.

Speaking as the inquest into the 52 deaths switched its focus to the Piccadilly line bomb, Liz Staffell said her daughter, Helen Jones, had had “huge potential, talent and compassion”.