In spite of all he has endured, Frank Gardner retains his BBC voice - clear, measured, concise, registering on my old tape recorder perfectly through the din of helicopters and passenger jets passing over the cafe where we meet. His wheelchair is pulled up to the table. He has put back a little of the weight he lost in hospital. It's a glorious early spring day, in a pleasant spot, 10 months after he was shot, but on his face, almost all the time, apart from the occasional smile, is an expression of frowning concentration, such as you see on the face of TV reporters who are first on the scene of a terrible disaster. It is quite unaffected: Gardner is still reporting from inside himself, from the war which entered him last summer, scene of his grief at the death of his colleague Simon Cumbers, his anger towards the killers, and the physical destruction of his body, which goes on causing him pain - pain that can't be eased without punishing side effects.

"I just think it's cowardice to shoot somebody who's defenceless. That isn't brave, that's not making a stand for your beliefs, that's just cowardice. What kind of a battle is that? It's one thing for them to be taking on the police in a shootout, but taking on a couple of unarmed, defenceless journalists?"

There were times when Gardner and Cumbers would feel nervous about where they were going, but June 6 2004, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, wasn't one of them.

The district of the Saudi capital they were visiting had, it is true, been the scene of a shootout between security forces and Islamist fundamentalist militants six months earlier - that was why the two BBC men were going, to film some general footage of the area - but they didn't feel they were taking a risk.

This wasn't Fallujah, or some Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. This was neat, rich, outwardly modern, usually safe Riyadh. Gardner, the BBC's security correspondent, a fluent Arab speaker at home in the Gulf, and Cumbers, an experienced cameraman, had waited for permission from the Saudi ministry of information before going. They even had a government minder with them, and a government driver in a government van.

It was their last job, on the last day of their assignment to Saudi. Their flights to London were booked for the next day. In war zones, journalists on their final day tend to get jumpy but this wasn't a war zone. The only anxiety left was over the story - had they got good material? - blending with warm anticipation of going home.

Gardner and Cumbers reached the area in the late afternoon. "It looked a completely normal Gulf residential suburb ... peachy coloured villas, bougainvillea coming down the walls, very average, a couple of kids playing in the street, nobody suspicious lurking in doorways and whispering or anything like that," says Gardner.

They filmed for half an hour, and prepared to leave. Cumbers was taking his camera off its tripod. They might as well have been on the plane home already. Gardner registered a car parking a short distance away, but it didn't come to a halt with a screech of tires and brakes. It parked quietly. The banal sound of car doors, the two nondescript young men strolling towards them in ordinary white Saudi tunics: at first Gardner assumed they were friends of the driver.

Too late, as the men advanced, Gardner understood. One of them - a beardless, completely average young man, in Gardner's description - took out a pistol.

"I shouted, in Arabic, stupidly: 'No, don't do this!' as soon as I saw him pulling out the pistol," says Gardner. "He was probably 30 metres from me and I took off at once - and I presume Simon ran at the same time. We ran in different directions. We had no time to make a plan."

Gardner ran from the gunman, deeper into the district. He heard a shot and something stung his shoulder. A bullet had passed through him. He kept running. There were more shots. He was hit in the leg, his leg bone was fractured, and he fell, on a patch of waste ground. "The adrenalin was really pumping so initially the shooting didn't hurt. It felt like a massive thump. With each bullet that went in it was like being picked up by a giant hand and slammed on the ground." Still, these were not deadly wounds. He would have made a full recovery. But the militants weren't finished.

A second vehicle drew up alongside him, a cargo van. Gardner found himself looking up into the side doorway of the van where three militants crouched, looking at him. One of them was pointing a pistol.

"I pleaded with them in Arabic not to shoot me," says Gardner. "They had a very quick discussion among themselves. I couldn't pick up what they were saying. Then they emptied the pistol into me at pretty much point-blank range." Four 9mm bullets smashed into Gardner's spinal nerves, pelvis and abdomen.

Gardner remembers the expression on the face of the man who shot him. "It was a sneer. It was a sneer of contempt, of hatred. Maybe he saw in me President Bush, Tony Blair, Ariel Sharon, Donald Rumsfeld, all rolled into one. I don't know. He didn't see me as a non-partisan reporter who's simply just trying to report what's going on. He saw me as the enemy."

Gardner found himself lying on his front, amazed to be still alive and conscious. He closed his eyes and pretended to be dead. He heard the feet of one of the militants walking around him and prepared to die. "I thought this is it, this is going to be the execution shot in the back of the head."

He felt the gunman rooting in his back trouser pockets. In one, he found Cumbers' radio mike. In the other he found a miniature Qur'an of the kind Gardner often gave out as gifts. That discovery, Gardner believes, may have saved his life, by giving the killer pause for thought. The militants drove off, leaving him bleeding in the dust.

Gardner rolled over and cried for help. His legs were paralysed. "My cries were just a sort of animal pain ... it was almost beyond pain. I'm amazed I didn't black out. Maybe some of the stomach acid had leaked, I don't know."

The locals who gathered at the scene astonished Gardner by their behaviour. It was as if, by being shot, he had put himself in a world beyond them. "They didn't help at all. To me this was extraordinary, they offered no reassurance, no glass of water, no blanket, no cushion, nothing. They were discussing the cartridge cases around. They were saying, 'Look, I think he's been shot, has he been shot, yes, he has, look at the bullet cases there,' as if I was just an exhibit in a museum. It was bizarre because I've had so much hospitality in the Middle East, so much kindness."

Instead of an ambulance, two police cars arrived. He was manhandled into the back of one of them and driven off, screaming in pain, to hospital. "It took them a long time to get me out of the police car and on to a hospital trolley, there was pulling and pushing and arguing. I remember them wheeling me into the operating theatre and me shouting for painkiller and somebody injected me - and then I was out and I didn't come back up for eight days." When he woke up, he saw his wife, Amanda. "It was fantastic to sort of swim up the surface of consciousness and open my eyes and see her there and although I was pretty groggy I asked a number of questions. I said: 'What's happened to Simon?' And she said: 'He didn't make it.'"

Cumbers, Gardner found out later, ran at right angles to him. He managed to run for about a kilometre, carrying his heavy Betacam camera, but couldn't find any cover. The militants shot him in the head.

In his eight days of drug-induced unconsciousness, Gardner himself came close to death. The first team of surgeons was well-intentioned but inexperienced. While they tried to patch him up, bullet hole by bullet hole, his life was slipping away. Two things saved him. One was that the governor of Riyadh heard what had happened and dispatched an emergency team, with a mobile intensive-care unit, from one of the city's best hospitals, the King Faisal. The other was that the team was led by a South African, Peter Bautz, who happened to specialise in gunshot wounds.

Bautz's team operated on Gardner for the next 40 hours as he went in and out of surgery. They operated on his stomach so many times - nine - that they didn't even close it up between operations, just kept it covered. "My intestines were very shot up, they had to take out quite a lot of them, there was internal bleeding, there was pus, fecal matter in there, there were infections, I had acute lead poisoning from one of the bullets. Dr Bautz told me one bullet went in, out and in again, somehow. So I was in quite a state."

This was the beginning of a medical ordeal that continues. The Saudis paid for Gardner's air ambulance back to Britain. Months of operations and recovery followed at the Royal London - where, despite superb care from a constellation of specialists, Gardner endured weeks of fever and vomiting as the result of infection from a feeding tube - and the Chelsea and Westminster. Incredibly, his major organs - liver, kidney, lungs, liver, stomach, heart - are relatively undamaged, and he now digests his food. He has lost part of his colon and his intestines, but has been told that he can do without them. His shoulder and leg wounds have healed. Even his spine is largely intact. Yet none of this is much comfort to Gardner and his family, because he still cannot walk, and will never fully recover the use of his legs. The militant's bullets severely damaged the cascade of nerves connecting the spine with the legs. Some were cut, and they don't grow back. Gardner has not experienced any of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress as a result of the horror he experienced. All his troubles now are related to being suddenly thrust into the ranks of Britain's estimated 40,000 spinal cord injury sufferers.

"The most stressful thing is coping with being disabled. Spinal injury is a complete life changer," he says. "There is life before the injury and life afterwards and in a way that has dwarfed the horror of what happened."

After the attack, when he was lying in the dirt, says Gardner, "I never reconciled myself to dying, no, absolutely not. I never, ever thought this is all too difficult, I'll just give up and die. Quite the opposite. It was thoughts of my family that kept me going. I love my family so much I want to carry on being a father and a husband to them."

Now the family - Gardner and his wife have two daughters, aged six and seven - are reunited, and it has been hard. "My wife has just been an amazing support, she has been so understanding. She married an able-bodied person and she's now got a disabled husband. That's tough for her as well. Physically, I've gone from being a runner who's quite robust to being somebody who's in a wheelchair and quite vulnerable, essentially."

And the children? "The younger one has taken it in her stride, I think she's fine. The older one, it's been quite tough for her. She was very shocked when it happened, she was wandering round the playground in a daze. She was asking, 'Why didn't they shoot daddy with a water pistol? Why did it have to be bullets?' For a six year old, as she was last year, she shouldn't be having to ask questions like that, she shouldn't even know what a bullet is.

"They're much better now that I'm back home. I was away in hospital for seven or eight months. At least now I'm able to read them their bedtime story every night. The tough thing is that I was very physical with them before. Particularly with the older one. I'd take her rock climbing and teach her rollerblading and take them swimming every weekend ... I'm getting stronger, but when I first came back from my operation in January I would eat a few morsels of food and then have to go and lie down feeling sick. So I've not had the same energy and dynamism that I had before. But I'm having to find new things to do with them, like chess. They both love chess."

Gardner's fascination with the Arab world, which took him around the Middle East as an investment banker and, since 1995, as a BBC journalist, began when he was 16. His mother took him to meet a friend, the late Wilfred Thesiger, the writer and explorer who had lived among the Arabs of the Empty Quarter in Arabia and the marshes of Iraq. Sitting in Thesiger's little flat in Chelsea, drinking tea, the young Gardner was not put off by the veteran's disgust with the modernisation of the oil-era Middle East. He was inspired by Thesiger's pictures and stories from the older Arab milieux of the 1940s and 1950s, and resolved to become an Arabist.

He read Arabic and Islamic studies at Exeter, but found the academic course tough going. It was only when the university sent him to Cairo for a year that he blossomed. He stopped going to classes, moved in with an Egyptian family in one of the city's medieval slums, and acquired fluent Arabic. A few years later he spent time living with the Bedu in Jordan, in the desert near Aqaba. "By day I would go out with the shepherds and we'd wander for miles with the goats and sheep over the dunes, drinking goat's milk, but then when it was Ramadan we had to fast, and I fasted with them, and at night there would be these huge feasts, tribes would come from all around ... it was a wonderful time. They would tell stories under the stars and somebody would play a rababo, a stringed instrument that makes a very mournful sound, and then somebody would recite traditional poetry.

"Since then I've made many Arab friends, mostly Muslim, some Christian. I've loved living in the Middle East. It has been good to us. I met my wife in the Gulf. Some of the nicest people I've ever met were in Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia.

"Would I go back to Saudi Arabia now? No. I wouldn't put my family, my parents, through that, even if I wanted to. Also I wouldn't want to go back and be seeming to thumb my nose at al-Qaida and say 'Na-na-na-na-na, you didn't get me.' I'm sure they weren't deliberately targeting me because of the job I do. If they were, it's an own goal, because they knocked out almost the only western broadcaster who bothers to explain what al-Qaida's complaints are, what their motivation is, so taking me off the air for nearly a year would be a pretty stupid thing to do."

Gardner has just gone back to his old job at the BBC - effectively, the Corporation's "war on terror" correspondent. He remains a tough critic of the Iraq war, dismissing the popular US belief that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. But would what had happened to him influence his wider reporting?

By way of an answer, Gardner says he had found inspiration in Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter executed by Islamic radicals in 2002. Before his death, he had used his knowledge of these terror groups to explain, not condemn. Gardner says that having survived a similar execution attempt he wanted to show that, by targeting journalists who sought to explain the reasons behind their actions, the militants were only hurting their cause. Not that this means forgiving the individuals who shot him and Cumbers.

"I will try very hard to be as objective as I was before. Do I forgive the people who did this to me? No, of course not. They haven't apologised, they showed no mercy. I've had no little note saying, 'Gosh, we feel sorry about what we did.'"

The Saudis claim that two of the five men who shot Gardner and Cumbers have been killed in subsequent shootouts, but have not made clear how they reached this conclusion. Nor have they allowed British investigators to talk to the unarmed government minder, whose actions during the attack remain a mystery to Gardner. "It's particularly tough for Simon's widow, because, of course, she'd like to know that the people who killed her husband have been brought to justice or that there's some kind of accountability."

Gardner gets tired easily these days, but seems astonishingly busy. Besides going back to work, writing a book and spending time with his family, he is doing all he can to start walking again. He is undergoing physiotherapy at Stanmore hospital. "By the time this piece comes out I will be starting to walk with calipers, but only for an hour or two a day, because it's pretty exhausting, and it's not terribly efficient either, which is why a lot of spinally injured patients tend to just stick with a wheelchair," he says.

"There is still hope, but the prognosis from Stanmore is that I will be a long-term wheelchair user. The best end point I think I can hope for is that I will only need splints from the knees downwards. I've been told I will never get my feet back; my feet are gone, basically. They're still there, but I can't feel anything. Except for pain. I have continual nerve pain in my legs. It keeps me awake at night. I never thought that nearly a year on from the injuries I'd still be in so much pain." Gardner's pain specialists have told him they cannot increase medication without giving him side effects such as drowsiness and headaches, which he refuses to countenance.

What he had not realised before about spinal injury, he says, is that feeling sorry for someone in a wheelchair because they can't walk is not the half of it. "What you don't see is the internal stuff. When you're spinally injured you also usually lose control of your bladder and bowels. In my case mine were so shot up that I had to have things like catheters and bags anyhow, so it's irrelevant for me, but for other people, that is one of the hardest things. They're having to use suppositories to empty their bowels, they're having to put these awful catheters up their genitals - it's really tough. Which is why I think a lot of spinally injured people have this sort of pained expression on their face.

"Several things have kept me smiling: being back with my family, writing a book and improving with physio. I think there will come a time when my locomotive improvement will hit the buffers, and I think that will be quite a depressing time. At which point I'll start investigating disabled sports such as disabled skiing and scuba diving. Life's got to go on.

"I want my life back. I accept it's never going to be the same as the life I had before injury but I'm determined to make the most of it. And one day I'll go off and do something completely different."