Noor Inayat Khan (1 January 1914, Moscow 13 September 1944, Dachau concentration camp) On September 13, 1944, a beautiful

l Indian princess lay dead on the floor at Dachau concentration camp. She had been brutally tortured by the Nazis then shot in the head. Her name was Noor Inayat Khan. The Germans knew her only as Nora Baker, a British spy. The first female radio operator to infiltrate occupied Paris, she was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and the George Cross one of only three women from the Special Operations Executive to receive the latter medal. But while Odette Hallowes and Violette Szabo have had Hollywood films made of their lives and blue plaques put up in their honour, Noor has been largely overlooked. The gentle Indian woman who sacrificed her life for Britain, has become a footnote in history. A memorial to her has long been overdue. And when a bust of Noor goes up in Londons Gordon Square in 2012, it will be the first statue to an Indian woman in Britain and the first to any Muslim. Given the contribution of Asian women in this country to arts, music,

literature, law, human rights and education, it is a gap that is crying to out be filled. Noors journey from her birthplace in Moscow to London was in many ways part of her exotic upbringing. A descendant of Tipu Sultan the famous 18th century ruler of South India, known as the Tiger of Mysore she was brought up a fierce nationalist by her father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Sufi preacher and musician. Noor was trained as a secret agent, given arms training, taught to shoot and kill, and finally flown to Paris under the code name of Madeleine, carrying only a false passport, a clutch of French francs and a pistol. Despite her spy network collapsing around her, Noor stayed in France for three months, until she was betrayed. What followed in October 1943 was arrest, imprisonment in chains, torture and interrogation. Noor bore it all. She revealed nothing to her captors, not even her real name. When the end came on September 13, 1944, it was not swift or painless. Defiant till the last, she shouted Liberte as she went down to a bullet fired at the back of her head.