Model student who took violent path

The son of a maths teacher and a chemistry lecturer, there was nothing in James McLintock’s upbringing to suggest he would be a candidate for radicalisation.

Growing up in Dundee, he was raised a Catholic and attended Lawside Academy.

But it was while studying at Edinburgh University in the early 1980s that he embarked on the path that would see him fighting communists in Afghanistan and Serbs in Bosnia.

Although he had been a model student, in his early 20s he began obsessively reading the Bible and effectively dropped out of university.

He then read the Koran after finding a copy on a friend’s bookshelf. A year later he had converted to Islam and changed his name to Yakub McLintock.

McLintock spent the next 18 months studying his new religion before, he claims, a chance encounter on a plane set him on a more violent path.

He claimed he only decided to train as a fighter after speaking to Saudi Arabians on a flight to Pakistan.

He had been going to visit a fiend but decided to follow the Saudis to a training camp after they said they were going to make jihad in Afghanistan.

The next 40 days were spent at an Arab-run training camp and he fought in the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan.

In 1994 he decided to take up arms again, this time against the Serbs in Bosnia.

However, it was not until 2001 that he earned the nickname the ‘Tartan Taliban’.

He was arrested on Christmas Eve at a checkpoint near Afghanistan’s border and held until he had been interrogated by intelligence services.

McLintock was released when it was proved he had been working for a charity.

However, Wikileaks documents released two years ago suggested he had links with al Qaida leader Ali Muhammad Abdul Aziz al-Fahkri and had helped to run terror training camps in Afghanistan.

Then, last week, he was added to the US Treasury’s lost of “global terrorists” and has now been accused of funnelling money from the Pakistani charity he runs to terror groups.