How hero patient spent two hours talking terrorist out of blowing hospital up

A hospital patient has been hailed a hero after talking a lone wolf terrorist out of blowing up a maternity wing.

Mohammad Farooq, 29, planned to ‘kill as many nurses as possible’ when he took a home-made pressure cooker bomb into St James’s Hospital in Leeds in January 2023.

He would have caused ‘utter devastation’ and ‘large scale loss of life’ had it not been for the incredible bravery of Nathan Newby.

Jailing Farooq for at least 37 years on Friday, judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said of Mr Newby: ‘He’s an extraordinary, ordinary man whose decency and kindness on January 20, 2023, prevented an atrocity in a maternity wing of a major British hospital.’

She said Mr Newby is a ‘modest and gentle man whose evidence was among the most remarkable this court has ever heard’.

During Farooq’s trial, jurors heard that when he first got to the hospital his plan had been to use a bomb threat to trigger an evacuation alert.

After stabbing fleeing staff, he would use an imitation gun to get police to shoot him dead.

But the text he sent to an off-duty nurse wasn’t seen for an hour, forcing him to concoct another plan.

His second plan involved sitting in one of the hospital cafes and waiting for a shift change to detonate the device, which was crammed with twice as much explosives as those used in the Boston Marathon bombing.

But prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford told the court ‘luck intervened again’ because Mr Newby happened to be standing outside the hospital having a cigarette and noticed Farooq.

He said: ‘Mr Newby realised something was amiss and began to talk to him instead of walking away.

‘That simple act of kindness almost certainly saved many lives that night because, as the defendant was later to tell the police officers who arrested him, Mr Newby succeeded in “talking him down”.’

In his police interview played at Sheffield Crown Court, Mr Newby told detectives how he spotted Farooq as he was walking back into St James’s in the early hours of January 20.

He said: ‘He just looked upset, as though he’d had some really bad news.

‘I’m quite good at judging people just by looking at them, I’m quite good at reading people’s body language.

‘I just thought I’d go over and see if he’s all right.

‘I thought, if he was down, I’d try and cheer him up.’

Mr Newby described how he began to chat with Farooq who told him he ‘just wanted to get them back’ and pointed at the hospital.

He said Farooq described how was either a student or had worked at the hospital for two years but now ‘he’s lost everything and just wanted to get them back for what they’d done’.

Mr Newby said Farooq told him: ‘They’ve stabbed me in the back. They’ve f***** me over.’

He told the officers that Farooq was agitated and kept looking down at a bag.

Mr Newby asked Farooq what was in bag and ‘he said “it’s just a bomb”.’

He said Farooq told him he planning to walk into the hospital canteen. ‘He was just going to set it off and walk out,’ he said.

Mr Newby said: ‘He even said that he was waiting for the right time, when it would be full of nurses.’

He said: ‘I was quite shocked. I thought “wow”.

‘I’m looking at what he said was a bomb. He just seemed normal, just like it was normal, as if he’d been shopping and he was showing me a set of trainers.

He said: ‘I just started talking to try and keep him calm. My priority was to get him away from the hospital.’

Mr Newby told the officers how he persuaded Farooq to move to a bench where he talked to him for a long time. ‘I was talking to keep him calm,’ he said.

‘I didn’t want him flipping.’

Mr Newby said he thought at one point about whether he would need to wrestle him to ground but ‘he seemed to be quite calm’.

Mr Newby said Farooq eventually said he wanted to hand himself in and passed him his phone to call 999.

It was during the emergency call that Farooq produced a handgun, which later turned out to be an imitation.

Mr Newby said he refused to take the gun from him and asked him to put it on the bench.

Before producing the gun, jurors heard Farooq shook Mr Newby’s hand, asked him for a cuddle and said ‘you seem like a nice lad’.

Mr Newby told the police: ‘I talked to him for so many hours, and he’s had a gun on him all the way through me talking to him.

‘What if I had wrestled him to the ground and he had got agitated? At a lot of what-ifs.’

Speaking after Farooq was jailed, Detective Superintendent Paul Greenwood said: ‘Nathan, in that act of kindness, turned from an act of kindness into an act of bravery.

‘With a lot of humility, Nathan says that he was just in the right place at the right time, and he did nothing special.

‘I think he was the right person in the right place at the right time because almost anybody else, when they realised they were exposed to such risk, would have walked if not run away, quite rightly.

‘But Nathan, very bravely, continued to expose himself to a sustained threat.

‘Even when, during the 999 call, Farooq produced what appeared to be a genuine 9mm handgun, which was actually a blank firing gun that Farooq had adapted to look genuine, he continued in the call and continued to engage and de-escalate Farooq, persuading him to put the gun down and awaited the arrival of the armed officers.’

Mr Greenwood said: ‘He very much plays down the intervention that he had, but I think it was incredibly brave.’

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