LONDON (UK) – A British spy of Indian Muslim descent, who did espionage for the country during World War II, was honoured with a plaque on Friday. It marks her former residence in London more than 75 years after she was executed in Germany.
Noor Inayat Khan is the first woman of Indian origin to be honoured with a blue plaque as part of the 150-year-old scheme to pay tributes to notable figures from the country’s past.
The plaque marking the Central London residence of Khan, which she left at the age of 29 to work as the first female undercover radio operator in Nazi-occupied France, will be unveiled by her biographer Shrabani Basu in a virtual ceremony on Friday.
“When Noor Inayat Khan left this house on her last mission, she would never have dreamed that one day she would become a symbol of bravery. She was an unlikely spy,” Basu said.
“As a Sufi she believed in non-violence and religious harmony. Yet when her adopted country needed her, she unhesitatingly gave her life in the fight against Fascism.”
She was captured by Nazis and eventually executed at Dachau concentration camp in 1944. She was posthumously given the George Cross.
After a long campaign by Khan to keep her memory alive in Britain, a statue was unveiled in 2012 in London.
She was born to an American mother and Indian father of royal descent in Russia. Educated in Paris, she fled to the UK during the onset of the war.
She returned to France to work as a secret agent in 1943. When the German Gestapo made mass arrests of members of the resistance, she was given a chance to escape to the UK.
But Khan refused to leave her post and opted to stay. When she was finally arrested, she did not divulge details of the resistance to interrogators. Her final word before she was executed was said to have been “Liberte”, or “Freedom”.
(Photos syndicated via Reuters)
This story has been edited by BH staff and is published from a syndicated field.
