From ordinary teenager to Taliban supporter (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

From ordinary teenager to Taliban supporter

11:50am Tuesday 9th September 2008 in News By Sarah Cosgrove

A FORMER teacher of a man who conspired to cause mass murder has told how he changed from an ordinary teenager into a radical Islamist who supported the Taliban.

Religious studies teacher Mark Hough taught Abdullah Ahmed Ali at Aveling Park School in Walthamstow.

Ali, of Prospect Hill, Walthamstow, and Tanvir Hussain, of Nottingham Road, Leyton, were convicted along with Assad Sarwar of consipracy to murder.

But the jury was unable to reach verdicts on a charge that they had specifically intended to blow up aircraft using homemade bombs disguised as soft drinks.

Ali was one of ten pupils in Mr Hough’s GCSE Religious Studies class in the mid 1990s.

He said Ali, who called himself “three A’s” as a teenager, was sporty with a good sense of humour and described him as “a proper one of the lads”.

But when he was around 14-years-old, the Muslim son of Iranian and French parents started taking his religion a lot more seriously.

“He went to the mosque two or three times a week and he used to go out on a Friday lunchtime to meetings in a house in the Higham Hill area,” Mr Hough said.

“He would always come back with literature to show you. He was always trying to persuade other people that Islam was the path to follow.”

Ali became more political and developed strong views on the situation in Afghanistan and the conflicts in Bosnia and Chechnya.

Mr Hough, who is now a teacher at a different school in the borough, added: “He was very much in favour of what the Taliban were doing in Afghanistan. He thought it was a model society.

“He thought if we had Sharia law, there would be no crime, people wouldn’t go hungry, people wouldn’t take drugs.

“He didn’t see it as girls not being able to go to school, his argument was girls could go through the marketplace and not risk being attacked by people.”

At a time before most people imagined innocent Britons could be bombed by a homegrown terrorist, the 53-year-old, said he was not concerned about the change.

“If I were his parents I’d probably be pleased, he was going down the mosque a lot - it beats standing around on a street corner.

“I think it kept him off the streets and in some ways it motivated him, he wanted to do well at school, he wanted to go to college.

In his religious studies class, Ali was passionate debater and an advanced thinker, but always respectful towards others.

Mr Hough assumed like teenagers who adopted extreme left or right wing attitudes, he would grow out of his views.

He said: “I was shocked when Ahmed was arrested but after 7/7 happened, I wasn’t especially surprised.”