This is truly bizarre
THE marijuana fumes drifting from Willie Brigitte’s locked room were unmistakable to newlywed Melanie Brown.
| "Whoa! Smells like weed!" |
Melanie Brown ... married Brigitte 13 days after meeting him.
| "Hi, there, handsome! What's your name? Wanna get hitched?" |
She asked her husband, who had once sermonised on the evils of the drug, where it had come from. He admitted to smoking it. "Willie told me he wanted to divert the attention of police," she told French interrogators in Paris earlier this year in transcripts obtained by The Daily Telegraph. "He said that it was a facade to trick Australian anti-terrorist police. A person who smokes drugs could not be suspected of being a radical Muslim."
| "Thash right, bebby! If I'm, like, whacked outta my mind all the time, they won' realizhe I'm a innernational criminal mastermind!" |
But for Brown, the former Australian soldier who wed Brigitte to fulfil her duty as a freshly converted Muslim, it was another confounding side to her complex, secretive and highly paranoid spouse.
| "Hello, Mom? Hey, my old man's really weird!" |
In the six weeks that they lived together since their marriage on August 30, Brown threatened to leave the Frenchman several times due to the constant lies, duplicity and control he tried to exert over her. She eventually concluded he had lost his mind. "Willie Brigitte seemed completely mad to me," she said.
| "A nut. A loon. We're talkin' major bonkers!" |
"For example, he said that non-believers had to die and that it was necessary to kill all those who attack Muslims. I regarded him as an extremist religious Muslim but I couldn’t connect him with a specific group."
| "That's because I'm not very bright." |
"My husband represented a danger. That is why I refused to give him any confidential information I had in my possession."
| "A little nookie — okay. But none o' that confidential information!" |
Arriving in Sydney on May 16, Brigitte was taken in by Pakistani Faheem Khalid Lodhi, also known as Hamza and identified by French investigators as the chief of an al-Qaeda-linked terror cell in Sydney. Hamza introduced the Rastafarian Frenchman to a Senegalese Muslim Mamadou Ndaw (aka Mohamed). Ndaw secured a job for Brigitte at the halal restaurant where he worked, Island Dreams. Brigitte told Ndaw he needed a wife, quickly. Ndaw set up a meeting with Melanie Brown, a friend of his fiance Miriam. They met on Sunday, August 17 at the home of Brown’s "religious protector", the Syrian Ahmed al-Wash. They married 13 days later. "Willie thought martyrdom was the most beautiful thing in the world," she said.
| "I preferred sex. We had problems from the start." |
"I listened to his monologue describing a martyr’s death as an apogee."
| "There I was, nekkid as an egg, except for the bunny ears and a pair of fluffy pink slippers! So what does he talk about? Exploding! I tried to explain to him that there's a difference between 'boom' and 'boom-boom.' He wouldn't listen. He said he'd have to try them both to see which one was better, but he was gonna do the short one first." |
Brigitte would expand on his beliefs during his interrogation in Paris. "I want to serve Allah until I die and to spread the word ... Insha Allah," he said. "It is important to sacrifice one’s life ... and to discover how to earn the ticket to paradise and escape hell with the help of God on high."
| "I am, like, sooooo stoned! Is there any more of that giggle juice, man?" |
But his Australian wife doubted he would follow through on his words: "I first thought that my husband could have had enough desire and courage to be a martyr. Now, having lived with him for six weeks, and thinking about all the lies he told me, I think he would have sent somebody else in his place."
| "That's what he did in our bedroom, anyway: Mahmoud, Ahmed, Abdullah, Bob, that guy with the hat..." |
Brown, 26, said Brigitte began acting strangely from the outset. "He was very paranoid," she said. "In the street he asked me to dress in such a way that I would be able to respond to an attack. He was scared of all non-believers."
| "Yeah! You gotta dress in ninja clothes, baby! That's so you can protect me! I'm an important man, y'know. Gimme s'more o' that grass! I think the cops are getting suspicious!" |
"Undoubtedly he was frightened about things he had on his conscience, but he did not say what." She added: "At any rate, if I had asked for explanations, he would have lied to me."
| "He had to keep putting his lips back on. It was very disconcerting!" |
Alone in their flat, Brigitte was often in his room, tapping away at the laptop which he kept hidden from his wife. "He had a laptop and a black travel bag with wheels which was closed all the time. I saw a tae kwan do magazine which I flicked through," she recalled. When Brigitte found her, he told Brown never to go near the bag again.
| "Stay the hell out o' my stash, damn you! Now, gimme them joints!" |
Brigitte’s close friends, mostly from Sydney’s Pakistani community, told him his soldier-wife was not to be trusted. "He told me that these people found me to be nasty and that they considered me to be a spy," she said.
| "Yes! A spy! Prob'ly for the CIA! We should kill her!" |
Brigitte’s only guests, Brown told the French inquisitors, were men whom he never introduced to her. They gathered in his room for regular clandestine meetings. Conversation was in whispers. Phone calls were mostly in French. When he had an English conversation on the phone, he would move to another room. During their six weeks together before Brigitte’s arrest, they only went outside the flat together twice: once to Brighton Beach in Botany Bay and once to Bankstown shopping centre. "During this walk, he absolutely insisted that I only stay to his right," Brown said. "This seemed to me to be positioning to protect me against what might happen to me."
| "I mentioned this to him, but he said he was only teaching me to walk at heel..." |
Brown said Brigitte, who was born on the French Caribbean outpost of Guadaloupe, was a compulsive prevaricator. "Willie duped me," she said. "He lied to me all along the way." Brigitte told Brown he had a working visa. It was a tourist visa.
| "He told me he was 6 foot 2, but he was only 5 foot 4. He said he was blonde. His hair was black..." |
To get the visa extended, Brigitte had Brown draw up an affidavit within days of their marriage, in which Brown undertook to cover his financial needs.
I need some dough, baby!"
"How much do you need, sweetie?"
"128,000."
"Right. I'll sell my Mom's house." |
Brigitte had told authorities he had lost his passport. But he showed Brown his old passport, with the Pakistani visa. Brown then suspected Willie had trained there for the military jihad. But, she told French interrogators, her sense of duty to her husband, as dictated by Muslim scriptures, stopped her from reporting her suspicions.
| "I mean, really, he coulda just been taking in the sights and the friendly faces of Olde Peshawar!" |
But it was Brigitte’s persistent questions about her military background that alarmed Brown. "If I didn’t answer his questions on military subjects he got angry," she said. "Willie asked me if I knew Pine Gap and I told him I did, but I also realised that there was also an American base there," she said. "He looked at me and gave me a nod of approval because he knew that there was this base there." Brown was sufficiently worried to burn three notebooks detailing her tour of East Timor as an encryption specialist with the army’s electronic warfare unit. |