Mary Quin stood before the red-brick mosque and waited for the man who nearly took her life.
It was London, October 2000, and a group of young men guarded the crummy building’s wrought-iron gate. One of them was wearing camouflage fatigues.
Quin had just arrived from America, determined to find Abu Hamza al-Masri — the mosque’s one-eyed, hook-handed cleric who she suspected was behind her abduction in Yemen just two years before.
If she sat there watching, she’d arouse suspicion. So Quin walked to a nearby pub and ordered a beer to pass the time.
“I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling that I should leave. A strange certainty came over me that I was about to meet the mullah,” she wrote in her 2005 book, “Kidnapped in Yemen.”
She was halfway to the mosque when she saw someone attempting to park a beaten-up, blue Mercedes. She knew it was him — the driver didn’t have hands!
“Excuse me, but is that Abu Hamza?” Quin asked one of al-Masri’s followers, as a crowd gathered near the car.
“Yes. How do you know about Abu Hamza?” he replied.
The preacher emerged, and Quin pushed her way through the devotees and approached him.
“My name is Mary Quin,” she said. “I arrived here from America this morning in the hope of speaking with you. Did you receive the e-mails I sent?”
Al-Masri was preoccupied. He said no but motioned with his stumps for her to come inside.
“There are some books that will tell you everything you need to know,” he said, adding, “They will explain my teachings.”
As he headed toward the door, Quin stepped in front of him. She couldn’t let this chance slip away.
“Wait,” she said. “I’m writing a book myself and have come all the way from the United States to talk to you.”
He finally agreed to give her 15 minutes, assuming she was interested in his fiery sermons.
But when they met days later, Quin cut off his ranting.
“I have come to talk about Yemen. I am one of the tourists who was taken hostage,” she said.
Al-Masri leaned back in his chair and smiled.
“I am surprised that you would have come here,” he replied. “Very surprised.”
Quin had been a Xerox executive in upstate Rochester and a fearless world traveler, visiting countries along the Silk Road, and places like Rwanda.
On Dec. 28, 1998, Quin joined 15 other travelers on her most adventurous trip yet — through Yemen’s rough desert.
They had planned to drive 180 miles west to the port city of Aden along a well-traveled route. So they thought nothing when a white pickup truck packed with men pulled in between their first and second Land Cruisers.
Then the truck swerved sideways and blocked the convoy. Men carrying guns and grenade launchers jumped out.
Their faces were covered with head scarves, and they hijacked the vehicles in a matter of minutes. Then they took the shell-shocked travelers to an isolated hill.
The militants forced the hostages to sit on blankets while they collected their passports.
“Who Americans?” the ringleader asked them, visibly disappointed that there were only two in the group, including Quin, a dual citizen of New Zealand.
“You want to know why we have taken you?” the kidnapper continued. “You are not responsible for the bombings in Iraq, but your countries are.”
While the tourists sat idly for hours, the terrorists interrogated a few male travelers on why they came to Yemen.
By the next morning, however, the kidnappers were lighthearted — even offering the hostages juice and cookies.
After 24 hours, vehicles came and left the secret site, and Quin assumed a deal had been negotiated with the Yemen government.
Then the sound of gunfire pierced the air.
The gunmen pushed the tourists to a low dirt wall and ordered them to stand in a line with their arms up.
Yemeni troops charged toward the hostage site, and the kidnappers ducked behind their hostages — using them as human shields. One jihadist pressed his AK-47 into Quin’s back.
“We stood in a loose cluster together, within reach of each other, our arms in the air . . . I could not believe this was the day, the place, where my life would end,” Quin writes.
Four hostages, three British and one Australian, were killed in the shootout.
The raging gun battle went on for an hour, and Quin couldn’t take standing in the crossfire any longer. She made a fight-or-flight decision that would save her life.
The thug that held her at gunpoint had been shot. He was struggling to get up, and his AK-47 was in front of him.
Quin reached toward the assault rifle, yelling, “I want that gun, you little bastard.”
She pulled at the weapon, but he held on, screaming, “No! No! No!”
She kicked him in the face, and he still wouldn’t let go. That’s when she stomped on his head and wrestled the gun away.
“I inched closer to him and brought my right foot down hard on his head,” she writes.
“I knew that pointing the soles of the feet toward someone is considered an insult in Arab cultures, and I took perverse pleasure in how insulting it must be.”
In her book, she said she thought, “This isn’t what you are supposed to be doing, Mary. You’re a business executive. You don’t do this stuff.”
She ran toward the Yemeni soldiers and sat against a dirt wall.
“At that moment, I knew that my life was forever changed. There was no way back,” she says.
In the aftermath of her rescue, Quin couldn’t let go of the horrific memories. She obsessed over news reports and wondered why she was a target.
The kidnappers, she learned, wanted to exchange the tourists for jailed British comrades who had been arrested in Yemen for a bomb plot just days before.
Two of these conspirators were the son and stepson of the radical Islamist cleric al-Masri.
Quin read that during the Britons’ trial, a prosecuting lawyer claimed “the conspiracy started . . . in the offices of Abu Hamza, who exports terrorism to other countries.”
She discovered the radical cleric — who reportedly lost both his hands and one eye in a land-mine explosion in Afghanistan — was the leader of London’s Finsbury Park Mosque.
The Egyptian-born cleric came to Britain in 1979 to study civil engineering. He married a British woman, worked as a nightclub bouncer and soon after gained a reputation for heavy drinking.
But in the 1980s, he reinvented himself as a sheik and veered toward fundamentalist teachings, recruiting militant young men to his London mosque.
He’d go on to inspire failed “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.
Britain’s Charity Commission finally banned him from preaching at the mosque in 2003, but he continued his tirades on the street outside.
He was jailed three years later for inciting racial hatred and murder.
Even before that arrest, Quin knew that if she wanted answers, she’d have to meet the contemptible Captain Hook.
So that day in October, she found herself in his office, which was hidden behind a thick curtain and beneath a stairwell.
Al-Masri was behind a desk, talking to young men who sat against a wall. Four children played on the ground at the handless mullah’s feet.
The imam let her tape record their conversation, and he admitted to providing the kidnappers with a satellite phone and even speaking to them as the ambush took place.
She confronted him about the deaths of her fellow tourists.
“We never thought it would be that bad,” al-Masri said, according to a 2007 report by British newspaper The Express.
Al-Masri claimed he instructed the kidnappers not to harm the hostages.
“Islamically, the kidnapping was a good thing,” he told her. “It denounced an un-Islamic government.”
The brazen interview would later lead to al-Masri’s demise.
According to reports, US officials used it as evidence to bring him to America.
Al-Masri was taken into US custody last week after an eight-year battle to extradite him from Britain. He faces charges of conspiring to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon and for orchestrating the kidnapping in Yemen.
Quin could be a key witness in his trial.
More than a decade after her ordeal, Quin, now 59, lives in Anchorage and runs a boutique. She doesn’t talk about her exploits anymore and declined an interview request.
It’s unclear whether she still travels the globe, but al-Masri left her with one final threat.
Before he had Quin escorted from his office, he asked whether she’d ever return to a Muslim country.
She said yes, and the imam suddenly leaned forward.
“Do not go back to the south of Yemen,” he warned. “They will not bother with kidnapping foreigners next time. Rocket attacks on tourists will be next.
“From the top of a hill, they can fire a rocket at a car. You will not see it coming . . .”
kbriquelet@nypost.com