Friday 11 April 1980. I was in Kuwait on a fundraising trip. After a hard day of rejections—I couldn’t persuade anyone to support our welfare projects in Britain—I was ready for bed. The phone rang just as I was about to fall asleep. It was a friend from London. ‘Muhammad has been killed’, he said in a nervous, quivering voice. ‘He was shot at point-blank range by two Libyans in the courtyard of the London Central Mosque in Regents Park, following Friday prayers’. ‘Why?’ I asked instinctively even before the news had sunk in. He could not answer. He simply said: ‘Be careful and don’t come back to London’.
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