“He wanted to kill them, so they saved his life.” What is the story of an American soldier who entered to blow up a mosque and converted to Islam?

Thirteen years ago, Richard McKinney entered a mosque in Muncie, Indiana, not for worship, but for killing and destruction, after the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan charged him with strong hostility to Islam and Muslims, but he left the neighborhood mosque as a Muslim and today he became an advocate of Islam.

Richard McKinney, a former US Marine who was raised to hate Islam during the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, was so angry when he returned to his home in Muncie to see how Muslims had settled there and even sent their children to sit next to his daughter in her elementary school.

The last mission

Unable to contain his anger toward Muslims, McKinney went to the Muncie Islamic Center in 2009, which he considered his last assignment.

He was on his way to plant a bomb in the mosque in the hope of killing or wounding hundreds of Muslims, but before that he had made an exploratory visit to choose a location to hide his bomb and to gather intelligence that would validate his assumption that Islam was a "killer ideology".

He said that day, "I told people that Islam is a cancer. I was the surgeon who treated it."

But when McKinney entered the mosque, he encountered a form of resistance he had not planned, and something happened that day, which he had never expected, that would have changed his course to the opposite.

He wanted to kill them, so they saved his life

McKinney recently spoke to CNN about his unexpected transformation, after he walked out of his house to the mosque, which he thought would end up killing him.

He entered the mosque armed, but faced resistance of a different kind that he had never expected.

Instead of the scenario of killing him that he had drawn in his imagination, a number of worshipers came to him and took off his weapon with which he wanted to kill them. Then an Afghan citizen named Muhammad Bahrami, one of the founders of the Islamic Center, came forward and hugged him and burst into tears.

"To this day, it still doesn't make sense to me!" McKinney says of that moment.

Shifting from one extreme to the other

McKinney met in the Islamic center in his city and then in the Muslim community a number of people who helped him dispel his anger until he felt guilty for what he intended to do.

One of them was Jomo Williams, an African-American who lived in a McKinney-like state of hostility, after the "white occupiers" executed and castrated his great-grandfather.

He then met a woman he called "Mother Teresa", from the Muslim community in Muncie, the wife of the Afghani Muhammad Bahrami, who greeted McKinney with a hug for the first time.

Mother Teresa also knew the damage war can cause. Her family was displaced in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded it in 1979, she fled her country and lived six years in a refugee camp in Pakistan before she married and made her way to the United States.

McKinney continued to visit Bahrami and others at the Islamic Center, read the Holy Qur'an, and made friends with Muslims through whom he learned about Islam and its teachings.

Eight months after McKinney's first visit to the mosque, he converted to Islam in a celebration at the Islamic Center and a welcome he called "a big hole of hugs" from the people he once intended to harm.

Eventually McKinney served as president of the Islamic Center in Muncie for two years and became an advocate of Islam.