Try telling this family the ISIS bride deserves legal aid... defended the she terrorist who shattered their four daughters’ lives
And what’s worse? As their father reveals in his first ever interview since the Manchester Arena bombing, they’re getting a pittance in help compared to her
WHEN nightmares tear children sobbing from their sleep, parents can usually soothe their fears away with words of reassurance. Because monsters aren’t real, are they? They don’t exist — not really.
Only for Robert and Claire Dowson’s children, they do. A real-life monster did lie in wait for them and try to kill them, and very nearly succeeded. The monster managed to slaughter 22 people, innocent teenagers and children like them, and parents, too, blowing them apart with a home-made bomb packed with nuts, bolts and screws.
The Dowsons and their four daughters were among hundreds injured at the Manchester Arena almost exactly two years ago, as they exited an Ariana Grande concert. The monster in question was 22-year- old Salman Abedi, a Manchester-born radicalised terrorist of Libyan descent, who hated them simply for being free, happy and having fun.
Thoughts of him often have them waking up in the night, or breaking down in class. He’s also there visibly, in the scars indelibly marking their skin.
And now there’s another monster, as they see it, lurking in the shadows. Robert and Claire just don’t have the words to chase this one away.
Last month, the girls — Sophie, 19, Charlotte, 14, Amy, 12, and Molly, nine — learned from newspaper reports that Shamima Begum, the Islamic State bride who left London to join IS aged 15, is now fighting a Home Office decision to strip her of British citizenship, so she can come back to the UK. She could end up using hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal aid from the public purse.
That night, after the story broke, the girls were too anxious to sleep. If she’s allowed back, who else will be? How long before another bomb goes off? Even when they finally drifted off, two later woke in the grip of panic attacks, shaking and gasping.
Begum and Abedi disturb Robert and Claire’s sleep, too. Not only were they there that night, waiting in the foyer to pick up their girls, and saw horrors they can never articulate, they’ve also been left with a deep sense of anger.
‘ It would be impossible for anyone who hasn’t lived through this hell to imagine the devastating impact the Manchester bombing has had on every member of our family,’ says Robert, who has requested that we protect their identities, fearing recriminations from IS supporters.
HECONTINUES: ‘We are appalled that anyone would consider paying hundreds of thousands of pounds to aid the return of someone who supports the terrorist organisation behind it. She even justified the attack by claiming it was a “two-way thing”, an eye for an eye, because of what’s happening in Syria.
‘Meanwhile, we are having to fight for a few thousand pounds in compensation for our innocent children whose bodies — and lives — will never be the same again. But what’s far more upsetting than the huge sums of money being made available for her legal fees is the terror that even the thought of her returning strikes into our girls.
‘People try to excuse Shamima’s behaviour by saying she was brainwashed, but so was Abedi, and my children know, from bitter experience, what terrible atrocities that could mean she is capable of. One of them was struggling to sleep again last night, haunted by images of this girl, who they see as an actual monster, powered by remote control to kill.
‘It may sound crazy to anyone who hasn’t been through what we have, but we will never recover from what happened. The terrible things we saw are etched in our memories and haunt us.’ Robert tentatively
turns to the events of that night. This is the first time the family have shared their story — perhaps one of the most dramatic testimonies of that dreadful night.
He and his wife had gone to the cinema after dropping their four girls at the concert. They returned ten minutes before the end of the set to pick them up.
Robert is a man consumed by guilt today as chillingly, minutes before the explosion, this gentle, devoted father had looked the bomber in the eye and had an ‘overwhelming gut instinct’ that something was horribly wrong.
He even pointed out Salman Abedi to Claire, who was on her phone liaising with Sophie in the arena. He told her to look at Abedi’s enormous rucksack, saying: ‘I think he’s got a bomb.’
Convinced her husband was overreacting, Claire told him not to be ‘paranoid’. He took his eyes off Abedi for just a second, as he scanned the crowd and saw his girls. In that second the terrorist detonated his device.
‘A couple of minutes earlier, he’d sat down next to me, we’d looked one another in the eye and I could see he was terrified,’ says Robert.
‘When he stood up, his rucksack seemed so heavy. It looked to be full of jam jars. He had to lean forward to carry it. My suspicions were first aroused because he wasn’t old enough to be picking up his kids, as most of us waiting there were, but I tried telling myself he was probably just on his way to the nearby train station.
‘But what would you do? What could you do, when someone looks suspicious but is not actually doing anything wrong? How can you decide if you need to act or not?
‘Then everything happened so quickly. There was a blinding flash of light and a huge bang and I knew immediately what he’d done. There was so much smoke I could hardly see, but I ran into the crowd, looking for my girls and shouting: “You b*****d!” By then, of course, it was too late.’
As Robert searched for his children among the dying and injured, the Dowsons encountered terrible sights. But out of respect for those who lost loved ones, he won’t speak about that publicly. He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find Charlotte behind him. Ghost-like, the colour drained from her face, she whispered: ‘Dad, we’ve got to get out of here.’
Sophie, the eldest, had managed to drag over her youngest sister Molly, as well as Amy, who was drifting in and out of consciousness, her face covered in blood.
Once outside, they realised Claire was not with them. Sophie raced back into the foyer, where she found her mother in a deep state of shock, frozen to the spot.
‘I was screaming but couldn’t move,’ says Claire, 43. ‘It was just like watching a movie, until you realise you’re actually living through a terrible nightmare.’
Claire has no memory of this, but Sophie dragged her by the arm to where her other daughters were. They were sobbing hysterically as Robert held his jacket to Amy’s face to stem the flow of blood.
Aware that there were people with life-threatening injuries who would understandably take priority with the ambulance service, Robert, 48, chose to drive his family to the hospital in their home town of Chester, where he felt certain they’d get more urgent care.
THEhour-long motorway journey was terrifying, with Amy losing blood and her eyes rolling to the back of her head as she slipped deeper into unconsciousness.
Robert screeched to a halt in front of the emergency department entrance, asking a porter to park their car. After hearing what had happened, doctors rushed the two younger girls into surgery.
‘The rest of us paced up and down the hospital corridor for the two hours they were in surgery, not knowing how seriously hurt they were or what foreign bodies might be embedded in their wounds,’ recalls Robert.
‘ Their injuries weren’t lifethreatening, thank God, which I suppose makes us among the lucky ones.’
They had sustained deep flesh wounds and needed shrapnel removed. Over the months that followed, they had endless hospital
appointments for the injuries to be dressed and monitored. They also had injections to prevent diseases, such as hepatitis, resulting from any contaminants there may have been in the shrapnel.
Amy has been left with permanent scars on her left cheek, where she was hit in two places, as well as five scars on her left leg, one of which cut into her calf muscle, leaving it disfigured. Molly had a significant shrapnel wound on her left arm, which has left a permanent scar. But as their wounds healed, the psychological ones were already opening up.
The three younger girls have been tormented by night terrors ever since, and Charlotte also suffers from severe depression and anxiety. Just last week Amy was admitted
to hospital overnight after a crippling panic attack, one of countless she has experienced.
Robert — who lay on the floor guarding his bedroom door, while his traumatised children clung to their mother in the marital bed, for a month after the incident — is in no doubt that the family have posttraumatic stress disorder.
Even Ariana Grande herself has had a brain scan which shows that she suffers from PTSD, too.
‘She was at the other side of the arena when the bomb went off, meaning there were 16,000 people standing between her and Abedi, all of whom must be similarly affected,’ says Robert. ‘We weren’t offered brain scans, just left struggling to cope with the aftermath.’
In the early days, the Dowsons were given access to two trauma counsellors, one of them a volunteer, through the charity Victim Support.
But, having recently asked for more therapeutic support, they were told that due to funding issues they are now at the back of the queue.
Two years down the line, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority has awarded Molly £4,100, to be kept in trust until she is 18. Amy was offered £4,500 but, due to the extent of her injuries, a solicitor advised them to appeal this amount.
Charlotte and Robert are yet to be awarded anything. Claire and Sophie were advised to not bother applying, as they have so far declined the offer of trauma counselling (choosing instead to focus on supporting the younger girls).
This is despite the fact that Claire, who was self-employed, has lost thousands of pounds in paid work and been prescribed antidepressants to help her cope.
That is what makes them furious about Shamima Begum’s legal aid. ‘When the cost of protecting the rights of a terrorist becomes more than what is awarded to help a young victim of terrorism recover from her trauma, you know the system is broken and the law needs changing,’ says Robert.
‘This money would be there for my daughters to fall back on later. How do we know if they’ll be able to function properly or even hold down a job when they are older?’
Still, Robert is eager to put on record his praise for the support they received from ‘the good guys in all this’ — counter-terrorism officers, the police, hospital staff, and Victim Support workers.
Meanwhile, Charlotte, who was prescribed anti- depressants and anti-anxiety medication while she awaits an appointment with the Child And Adolescent Mental Health Services, sometimes feels such despair that she stays in bed for days, unable to go to school, let alone socialise with friends.
‘Every week since the concert, at least one of the girls has been too distressed to either go to, or stay in, school,’ says Claire, who ran a successful interiors company until two years ago.
‘One of them always needs me, so I was for ever having to let clients down, and business just dried up. But we need my income, so now I’m forced to work for minimum wage as a carer in the evenings, once Robert, who works in his family’s engineering firm, gets home. I earn a quarter of what I did.
‘I want to give our kids whatever support they need, but it can be impossible to figure out when they’re being just normal stroppy teenagers, or when they are showing signs of genuine trauma.
‘Parenting can be challenging at the best of times but we’re dealing with something few people have experience of.’
Robert agrees. ‘If the terrorists’ only aim is to create fear then, in our case, they are winning,’ he says. His greatest wish is that his children — all of whom now avoid public spaces, including shopping centres, supermarkets and train stations — do not have to spend the rest of their lives living in fear of further attacks.
The Sri Lankan atrocities on Easter Sunday sent them slipping into a pit of anxiety once again. CHARLOTTE,
who believes her whole family have, like her, been left clinically depressed, says: ‘If this Shamima Begum woman is successful, it could set a precedent for other terrorists to be allowed back here. I genuinely have no idea what I’m going to do if any of these people do return.’
It is left to Molly, who was just seven when she became a victim of terrorism, to sum up the frightening conundrum we face in dealing with Begum and her ilk.
‘If this woman comes back it will affect lots of people in a bad way,’ she says. ‘My sisters will have more panic attacks. People will be afraid when going out because she could still be a terrorist. But I am also scared she may do something bad if we do not let her back, because she will get angry at us.’
For this little girl, her real-life monster will always be there, waiting. And with the horrors of the Sri Lanka attacks still fresh in everyone’s memory, who knows how and when it will strike?
All names and identifying details have been changed at the family’s request.