Sadiq Khan
Having defied Labour whips by voting against Tony Blair’s moves to toughen antiterrorist legislation, Sadiq Khan has been rehabilitated under Gordon Brown (Greg Hurst writes.) Mr Khan, 37, was made a Labour whip when Mr Brown formed a government last summer, becoming one of Britain’s first two Muslims to serve as members of the Government.
He has special responsibility as whip for the Ministry of Justice - the very department that arranged the inquiry into the disclosure that he was bugged while visiting a constituent held in prison as a terrorism suspect.
Mr Khan arrived in the Commons at the 2005 election and soon impressed colleagues when he was thrust in the spotlight, as one of four Muslim MPs, appealing for calm after the July 7 London bombings. He won several awards tipping him as a rising star but his rebellion against the extension of precharge detention powers to 90 days blotted his progress under Mr Blair.
He used to work as a solicitor specialising in human rights law. He chaired the human rights group Liberty and was a legal adviser to the Muslim Council of Britain.
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Mr Khan, who is married, with two daughters, grew up in the South London constituency of Tooting which he represents. He plays football and cricket in parliamentary teams.
Babar Ahmad
Babar Ahmad’s supporters have conducted a legal and PR campaign that for almost four years has thwarted efforts to extradite him to the US (Sean O’Neill writes). They portray Mr Ahmad, 33, as a dedicated family man who is proud of both his Muslim faith and his British roots and was “saddened and deeply affected” by the September 11 atrocities.
The Free Babar Ahmad website – which carries a message of support from Sadiq Khan – describes him as caring and considerate. But a US indictment against Mr Ahmad depicts a man who, between 1997 and 2004, was a cog in al-Qaeda’s propaganda and fundraising machine.
Mr Ahmad, who worked in the IT department at Imperial College London, is alleged to have been a leading light in Azzam Publications, which set up jihadi websites and produced videos and literature promoting the Chechen mujahidin and the Taleban. The websites, the indictment states, aimed to solicit funds and equipment for mujahidin groups and to recruit individuals to travel to fight jihad. On a disk in Mr Ahmad’s bedroom, British police found a file that contained a classified document outlining US naval movements through the Straits of Hormuz in 2001, according to the arrest warrant.
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British police and prosecutors have never sought to press charges against him here, letting the US take the lead.