The quiet grammar school boy who joined Al Qaeda
HE was a hard-working grammar school pupil and respected member of his community who somehow turned into an Al Qaeda terrorist.
Four years after leaving school with ten GCSES and four A-levels, Saajid Badat was preparing to use a shoe-bomb to blow up a transatlantic flight.
The plan was for Badat to trigger his bomb in a co-ordinated attack with fellow British shoe bomber Richard Reid as they travelled to the U.S. on two airliners.
Badat’s transformation from softly-spoken, devout Muslim to would-be mass killer shocked relatives and friends.
After all, his parents were hardworking Pakistani immigrants who had placed great emphasis on his upbringing. His father Muhammed arrived in Gloucester via Malawi in the early 1970s and got a job at the Wall’s ice-cream factory.
Muhammed’s wife Zubeida was a seamstress who taught sewing classes.
Their hopes for a better life for their son, who was born in 1979, were fulfilled when he won a place at Gloucester’s Crypt Grammar School. After receiving a glowing report from headmaster David Lamper, who said he was ‘punctual, cheerful and polite’, Badat began a sociology degree in London in 1997.
He gave the impression of being a happily Westernised young man, a keen footballer and Liverpool FC fan who played for an Asian team at weekends. But his parents’ pride was to be shattered when he was arrested in November 2003.
According to family friends, Badat’s conversion to terrorism could have begun after an argument with his ‘very strict’ and religious father, who had made ten pilgrimages to Mecca and demanded his son dedicate his life to Islam by becoming a cleric. Badat defied him by going to university instead.
He occasionally came home to visit his mother, but would not speak to his father. Then in 1998, he dropped out of university after just one year.
In the next three years, Badat travelled in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was there that he became a fully-fledged Al Qaeda member, undergoing training in how to use explosives at two camps.
He studied terrorism alongside as many as 40 fellow Britons, including Reid, a south London petty criminal. Both Badat and Reid volunteered for the shoe-bombing operation and Badat went back to Europe via Saudi Arabia.
On September 11, 2001 – the day Al Qaeda carried out its murderous attacks on New York and Washington – he was at the British Embassy in Brussels, claiming to have lost his passport and duly receiving a replacement. Reid played the same trick, designed to secure a new passport free of incriminating stamps from Afghanistan.
He went on to catch a flight from Paris to Miami on December 22, 2001, shod in his explosive footwear, only to be stopped by fellow-passengers.
Three days before his own suicide mission, Badat pulled out.
It may have been a last-minute attack of nerves, or possibly a belated renunciation of violence.
He enrolled at the College of Islamic Knowledge and Guidance in Blackburn, and was reconciled with his father. Police caught up with him two years after his planned suicide mission, by which time he was yet again leading a harmless existence.
But after becoming the first convicted terrorist to reach a supergrass deal with UK prosecutors – a decision which will infuriate Islamic militants – Badat will forever be looking over his shoulder for those bent on revenge.