Babar Ahmad

Babar Ahmad
Ahmad after his release from prison in 2015
Born	1974 (age 42–43) London, England
Residence	London, England
Nationality	British
Education	University of London
Known for	Spent 11yrs in prison. Extradited to US. Awarded compensation by Metropolitan Police.
Website	babarahmad.com

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 2004-12 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."