Mary Quin knows firsthand about hate preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri’s terror plots — she lived through one.
In 1998, al-Masri instructed militants to abduct her and 15 other tourists as they toured Yemen’s deserts.
They were held for 24 hours until they were rescued by Yemeni troops. Four hostages were killed in the gun battle.
Quin was used as a human shield in the bloody shootout — but then showed her might, stomping on one jihadist’s head and wresting away his AK-47 to escape.
“I inched closer to him and brought my right foot down hard on his head,” she wrote in her 2005 book, “Kidnapped in Yemen.”
“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.”
A former Xerox exec originally from New Zealand, Quin, 59, now lives in Anchorage and runs a boutique. She could be a key witness in his trial.
In the aftermath of her rescue, she couldn’t let the horrific memory go, obsessing over news reports and wondering why she was a target, she writes.
She learned that the kidnappers wanted to exchange the tourists for British comrades who had been arrested for a bomb plot just days before. Two of these men were the son and stepson of al-Masri.
Her sleuthing eventually led her to the London mosque where al-Masri was an imam. She confronted him and he agreed to a tape-recorded interview, she writes.
“I am surprised that you would come here — very surprised,” he told her, and then admitted to providing help to the militants.
He asked Quin whether she’d ever return to a Islamic country.
She said yes.
“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 . . . You will not see it coming.”
Quin could prove to be a critical witness against the one-eyed, hook-handed al-Masri.
The radical imam appeared briefly in Manhattan federal court yesterday after being extradited from Britain.
He is charged with conspiring to create a terrorist training camp in Oregon and with helping stage the kidnapping.