CONTENTS
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE: OSAMA BIN LADEN
CHAPTER TWO: ROBERT MUGABE
CHAPTER THREE: COLONEL MENGISTU HAILE MARIAM
CHAPTER FOUR: RADOVAN KARADZIC
CHAPTER FIVE: CHARLES TAYLOR
CHAPTER SIX: IAN BRADY
CHAPTER SEVEN: CHARLES MANSON
CHAPTER EIGHT: PETER SUTCLIFFE
CHAPTER NINE: DENNIS NILSEN
CHAPTER TEN: JOSEF FRITZL
FURTHER READING
Copyright
There are so many evil people in the world that it was hard to limit the scope of this book to just ten of them. And when I say ‘evil’, I don’t just mean bad or misguided, or even misunderstood; I’m talking about people whose principal aim is to make life a living hell for the rest of us. Some, like Osama bin Laden and Charles Manson, may want to drag the entire world into bloodshed and chaos. Others, such as Robert Mugabe, are content to draw only their own people into the abyss. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and Charles Taylor inflicted murderous misery on two nations apiece, while Radovan Karadzic was happy to order the extermination of others who were not like him.
Ian Brady tortured and murdered defenceless children in an attempt to break down the moral constraints that the rest of us rely on to get through life. Peter Sutcliffe killed vulnerable women for his own sexual gratification and then claimed that he was doing the work of God, while Dennis Nilsen killed because he could not stand to be alone – something we all must face, from time to time.
History is littered with truly evil characters. The twelfth-century Mongol leader Genghis Khan once stated: ‘I have committed many acts of cruelty and had an incalculable number of men killed, never knowing what I did was right, but I am indifferent to what people think of me.’ It is estimated that he killed up to a quarter of the world’s population during his lifetime. Outside the cities he conquered, he built pyramids of heads before completely destroying the internal fabric, but his evil did not stop there: when he died on the shore of Lake Baikal in 1227, he left orders that, if anyone gazed on his coffin, the next one would be theirs.
The evil deeds of Adolf Hitler are almost too infamous to recount. He started World War II, which resulted in the deaths of up to 60 million. There are no reliable estimates of the number of wounded or displaced, or those who endured other terrible privations. Hitler was also responsible for the systemic murder of some six million Jews, along with gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and political allies, as well as direct enemies of Germany.
And it’s not just limited to men. In the 1860s, a million died during one woman’s attempt to make herself the Empress of South America. She was an Irish prostitute named Eliza Lynch, who was the mistress of Francisco Solano López, the President of Paraguay. To further her lover’s ambitions, she pushed him into simultaneously declaring war on Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in 1863. In the six-year battle that ensued, Paraguay was completely destroyed. When Lynch eventually fled the country not a single male over the age of nine was left alive.
For the purposes of this book, I was confined to write about evil people who are, at the time of writing, still alive. There are more than enough of them. You may disagree with my choice – you are, of course, free to come up with your own list. I have not presented my own selection in any particular order (I think it would be tasteless to come up with a Top Ten). Again, you are free to rank them.
Nigel Cawthorne
Bloomsbury, London 2009
On the morning of Tuesday, 11 September 2001, four US airliners were hijacked. Two of the planes, filled with passengers, were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, starting fires that eventually destroyed the 110-storey buildings. A third was crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. On board a fourth plane, believed to be heading for the White House, the passengers fought back against the hijackers. As a result, the aircraft crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, some 75 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. In all, some 3,000 people lost their lives.
A few hours after the Twin Towers collapsed, the Bush administration concluded that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were to blame, though bin Laden has actually never been formally indicted for the attacks. Soon the British government also came to the decision that bin Laden was to blame. Although bin Laden appears on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, this is for the bombing of the US Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998 when over 200 were killed. The wanted poster does, however, state: ‘In addition, bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world’ and also mentions that he is ‘considered armed and extremely dangerous’. And there is a price on his head: ‘The Rewards For Justice Program, United States Department of State, is offering a reward of up to $25million for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of Usama Bin Laden. An additional $2million is being offered through a program developed and funded by the Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association.’
At first, bin Laden denied involvement in the attacks, referring to them through an aide as ‘punishment from Allah’. Later, he took responsibility for ‘inspiring’ the events of September 11 although according to him, the attacks were down to the US for supporting Israel. Then, on video tape aired on the Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera on 29 October 2004, bin Laden admitted that al-Qaeda had decided that they ‘should destroy towers in America’ because they were ‘a free people… and we want to regain the freedom of our nation.’
Finally, in another video tape released through Al-Jazeera on 23 May 2006, he admitted: ‘I am the man responsible for the recruitment of the 19 people who carried out the attacks.’ This came two weeks after Zacarias Moussaoui, a would-be hijacker captured during flight-training two weeks before 9/11, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole on four counts of conspiracy.
‘Brother Zacarias Moussaoui has no connection whatever with the 11 September operation,’ said bin Laden, adding that Moussaoui’s confession was, ‘null and void, because it was extracted under pressure.’
Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organisation run and trained by Osama bin Laden, has also been responsible for attacks in the Yemen, Riyadh, Bali, Jakarta, Tunisia, Casablanca and Istanbul, as well as inspiring bombings in Madrid and London. It is linked to other terrorist groups across the Islamic world, and under the inspiration of bin Laden, it has declared a jihad or ‘Holy War’ against the US and the West itself. No one can say how many deaths bin Laden has been responsible for; what we can be sure of is that he has promoted hatred and bloodshed on a global scale and the death toll that can be laid at his door will continue to accumulate with the passing years.
Osama bin Laden was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was one of more than 50 children of one of Saudi Arabia’s richest families. His father, Muhammed Awad bin Laden, was a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi royal family. Originally from Yemeni, Muhammed bin Laden moved to Saudi Arabia as a youth, when he began a construction company. Soon, he became so successful that he could lend money to King Faisal, who issued a royal decree awarding all future construction projects to bin Laden’s company. As a result, the bin Ladens became the richest non-royals in Saudi Arabia with