Blackwater
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Ahmad pleaded guilty in an American courtroom to providing support for terrorism. The US authorities say that he ran a support network in south London which had near-unprecedented global reach. But his story is more complicated than that - the judge sentencing him concluded he was no international terrorist.
And at the heart of his network was a website - the first in English to spread jihad. The US says his network not only spread a dangerous ideology - it encouraged young Muslims to join al-Qaeda and turn their face against the West.
In the early 1990s, Babar Ahmad, who was educated at the exclusive Emmanuel School in Battersea, south London, co-founded an Islamic study group called the Tooting Circle. The teenagers who would get together for his talks would meet in each others' houses or in a local mosque that was often empty - and more often than not in the Chicken Cottage takeaway on the High Street.
Ahmad came from an upwardly-mobile British-Pakistani home with education and ambition at its core. His mother was a teacher and his father a civil servant
The Bosnian War that began in 1992 shocked the world. TV pictures showed Serbian soldiers killing white-skinned European Muslims
Over the next three years Ahmad fitted in volunteering in the Bosnian war around his university studies. He returned something of a local hero - not least because he received a shrapnel wound to the head.
Fight in the cause of Allah," it said, "incite the believers to fight along with you."
Babar Ahmad helped him go to Afghanistan, via a Taliban contact in Pakistan
BBC
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