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- Babar Ahmad (Urdu: بابر احمد; born London, England, May 1974) is a British Muslim of Pakistani descent who spent eight years in prison without trial in the United Kingdom from 2004 to 2012 fighting extradition to the United States. The US accused him of providing material support to terrorism via a website that he set up in the UK in 1996 to publish stories about the conflicts in Bosnia and Chechnya, but which in 2000–2001 allowed two articles to be posted on the site offering support to the then Taliban government in Afghanistan. The US accepted that the website was operated from the UK but claimed jurisdiction because one of the servers hosting the website was located in the US. He fought a public eight-year legal battle, from prison, to be tried in Britain but the British Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was "insufficient evidence to prosecute" him. In 2009, the High Court in London awarded Ahmad £60,000 compensation after the London Metropolitan Police admitted that its officers had subjected him to "serious gratuitous prolonged unjustified violence" and "religious abuse" during his arrest which led to 73 injuries. It was revealed that the officers, who abused Ahmad were also accused of dozens of other assaults on black and Asian men but the four officers were acquitted by a jury in June 2011. In October 2015, a London High Court of Justice judge ruled that PC Mark Jones, one of the officers acquitted in the Ahmad case, assaulted and racially abused two Arab teenage boys in another case. In 2011, celebrities and senior British lawyers backed a public campaign which led to 140,000 British citizens signing a UK Government e-petition calling for him to be tried in the UK. His case was subsequently debated twice in the British Parliament. Ahmad was finally extradited to the US in October 2012, having become the longest-serving British prisoner to be detained without trial in the UK. He spent the next two years in solitary confinement at a US Supermax prison. In December 2013, after his first year in solitary confinement and after being in prison for over nine years without trial, Ahmad pleaded guilty to two of the charges against him as part of a plea bargain that would allow him to return home within the year. He pleaded guilty to "conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism." In July 2014, US federal Judge Janet Hall sentenced Ahmad to an unexpectedly lenient sentence of 12-and-a-half years in prison, meaning that with credit for time served he only had another 12 months to serve. Judge Hall concluded that Ahmad was never interested in terrorism, stating, "There was never any aid given by these defendants to effectuate a plot. By plot, I mean a terrorist plot ... Neither of these two defendants were interested in what is commonly known as terrorism ..." Hall stated that Ahmad "never supported or believed in or associated with Al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden." Judge Hall described Ahmad as a "good person" who she believed posed no threat to the public and stated she had weighed the seriousness of his crime with his good character after reading thousands of letters of support and hearing from British prison officials who described him as an exemplary inmate. Judge Hall said "It appears to me that he [Babar] is a generous, thoughtful person who is funny and honest. He is well liked and humane and empathetic... This is a good person who does not and will not act in the future to harm other people." Ahmad was released in July 2015 and returned to the UK where Metropolitan Police officers welcomed him at London Heathrow Airport then offered to drive him home to his family. Upon his release he stated, "Eleven years of solitary confinement and isolation in ten different prisons has been an experience too profound to sum up in a few words here and now... In October 2012, I was blindfolded, shackled and forcibly stripped naked when I was extradited to the US." He added that "US and UK government officials" had treated him with respect after his release. In March 2016, he told The Observer in his first press interview since his release that he was "wrong and naive" to advocate support for the Taliban government back in 2001. (en)
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