The Terrible Murder of Gayle Williams

By Charley Brady

I thought that this week's column would be devoted to the parts of the Irish budget that went under the radar last week.

Instead, as the news of Gayle Williams' execution in Afghanistan began to filter in from friends in England last night, I just found myself numbed at the horror of it all.

To take the life of a beautiful young woman who loved the people of Afghanistan is almost incomprehensible to me.

I knew her only in the slightest way but loved what she was trying to do there.

It was a country and a people that she cared so deeply about and to see her taken away in the most cold and pointlessly callous manner that she was taken in has devastated her family and all who came into contact with this most courageous and good-humoured of women.

At first, when I began hearing the news, I assumed that Miss Williams had been unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place when a bomb went off.

In some crazy way, I almost think that would have been better for those left to mourn her.

But it wasn't quite like that. Miss Williams, who was 34, had chosen to live and work with young boys and girls who had lost their limbs in this ongoing nightmare.

She would never have an armed escort with her, was just plain joyous about the job she did, and yet the Taliban targeted her in a well-planned assault on October 20.

She was murdered while taking a quiet walk by two heroes who drove up beside her on their motorcycle, one of them shooting her several times.

Mercifully, she died almost instantly.

Miss Williams had worked in Afghanistan for just over two-and-a-half years and adored what she did there in her work for SERVE-Service and Emergency Relief and Vocational Enterprises.

As the Taliban, represented by a true patriot called Zabiullah Mujahid said in their statement: "She was working for an organisation which was preaching Christianity in Afghanistan. Our leaders issued a decree to kill this woman. This morning our people killed her in Kabul."

Well, hooray for you! It's pointless to ask how you sleep at night because you have such a poisonous mindset ingrained in to you that there is no need to go further.

You can't even see, you bloody barbarians, that this woman was caring for YOUR people, cared about YOUR people and loved YOUR country.

She represented Christianity. SO WHAT? I don't believe in any form of religion myself, but don't you see that you can discuss this without pulling out the guns and murdering a lone and very vulnerable woman who is taking a quiet stroll through YOUR country?

What exactly was left out of your miserable, useless, murdering DNA?

But that is letting emotion get in the way of the facts. It is simplistic to say that we are just not wanted there (although that is what I believe), yet many Muslims are reacting with horror to the execution of this young woman and saying that this was not done in their names.

A man, Daolad Khan, a worker on an adjacent building scene, said: "They raced up the street and stopped in front of the lady. They took out a gun and shot her on the spot. Then they rode off."

Some men. Some monsters.

I don't really want to believe what Robert E. Howard wrote, but sometimes I despair.

In the thirties the Texan writer said: "Barbarism is the natural state of Mankind. Civilisation is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism will always ultimately triumph."

Gayle Williams would have heartily disagreed with this sentiment, but sometimes... well, sometimes I just wonder.

The statement issued by her fellow aid workers said: "Gayle never spoke of the rigours and privations of aid work in Kandahar, one of the most difficult places for a young woman to work in the world, but she kept a smile on her face and always had a good-humoured chuckle at the difficulties she must have endured.

"Gayle will be remembered as one of the most inspiring people of the world, who truly put others before herself."

In August you murdering bastards killed three American female aid workers for the U.S. aid group International Rescue Committee (spotting a trend with these cowards, anyone?).

In your black hearts you are actually afraid of women, aren't you?

Don't you get it? They weren't journalists, who you have also murdered, they weren't military - THEY WERE AID WORKERS!

If it was up to me we would pull all aid out of Afghanistan, all military and instead concentrate on trying to show that there can be a peaceful co-existence; but that's not going to happen and you murderous swine know that.

You call yourselves men? What a monstrous joke you really are. Men don't treat women badly and they sure as hell don't kill innocent women.

I know that Miss Williams, had you not chosen to take her life, would be the first to forgive you.

I have no such forgiveness in me for craven, spineless swine like you.

I personally hope that you all rot for taking away a woman who was only trying to do good for you.

But, as I say, Gayle Williams wouldn't have wanted such sentiments.

So may I just give my heart-felt condolences to her family. And Gayle, may you rest in peace.