Babar Ahmad was re-arrested in London on 5 August 2004 on charges of providing material support to terrorism. An
affidavit filed with the US court detailed that Ahmad established
Azzam.com, a website established in 1996 that later solicited support for Chechen insurgents and the
Taliban regime in 2000/01. It further stated that items recovered from a house used by Ahmad included a floppy disk containing a detailed description of the movements of the
US Fifth Fleet battlegroup. Ahmad was later indicted by a grand jury of US citizens in October 2004. Another man,
Syed Talha Ahsan, was indicted in 2006 of involvement with Ahmad and with the battlegroup information in the document. In 2008, a US former navy seaman, Abu Jihad, was indicted and convicted of disclosing the classified information on the battlegroup but he was cleared of terrorism charges. However, when sentencing Ahmad on 16 July 2014, federal district Judge Janet Hall ruled that "nothing was done with the information" found in Ahmad's possession so, "the battle group document, besides showing that the Navy enlisted man was a traitor to his country, it also shows that Mr. Ahmad and Mr. Ahsan had absolutely no interest in operational terrorist actions that would harm the United States." US extradition documents stated that "at all times material to the indictment" Babar Ahmad was resident in London. The Crown Prosecution Service declared in July 2004 and December 2006, as did the UK Attorney General
Lord Goldsmith in September 2006, that there was "insufficient evidence" to charge Ahmad with any criminal offence under UK law. In September 2005,
Sadiq Khan, Member of Parliament for Tooting, presented a petition of 18,000 signatures to the Home Secretary
Charles Clarke asking for Babar Ahmad to be tried in the UK, instead of being extradited. On 16 November 2005, Clarke approved his extradition to the United States. On 28 November 2005, the UK Parliamentary
Home Affairs Select Committee raised serious concerns about the one-sided UK-US extradition arrangements and, in particular, the case of Babar Ahmad. In a
House of Commons emergency debate on 12 July 2006 about UK-US extradition, MPs from all parties raised concerns at the case of Babar Ahmad. His name has also been mentioned repeatedly in both the House of Commons and the
House of Lords in relation to UK-US extradition. On 30 November 2006, Ahmad lost his appeal at the High Court. On 4 June 2007, the House of Lords refused to grant him leave to appeal to them. On 10 June 2007, the
European Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg (France) ordered the UK Government to freeze Babar Ahmad's extradition until they had fully determined his final appeal. 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. In 2010, the review led the
Crown Prosecution Service to announce that four serving police officers would face criminal charges for assaulting Ahmad. 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. The Court based its judgement on the
European Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated as the
Human Rights Act 1998 in
English and
British law. In past cases, the
ECtHR had ruled to prevent the United Kingdom and the British Government from deporting, extraditing or repatriating terrorism suspects to other countries, where they would be subject or liable to, or where there was a likelihood that they would be subject or liable to, torture, or to degrading or inhumane treatment. In
Babar Ahmad and Others v the United Kingdom the legal representatives of the litigants, argued that extradition to a country, where they might be imprisoned for life, with no possibility of release on parole, and where the penal regime is in comparison excessively harsh, amounted also to degrading or inhumane treatment, and that the extradition therefore ought to be refused. On 22 June 2011, the Houses of Parliament
Joint Committee on Human Rights urged the UK government to change the law so that Ahmad's perpetual threat of extradition is ended without further delay. In November 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. On 24 April 2012, the BBC reported the testimony of a British man convicted of plotting to blow up an aircraft, from the trial of
Adis Medunjanin in New York City.
Saajid Badat alleged that he was radicalised by Babar Ahmad but when sentencing Ahmad in July 2012, Judge Hall ruled, "As to whether he [Mr Ahmad] radicalized anyone, I don't understand that. I think that the only person radicalized in this case is the cooperating witness. It's pretty clear to me that Mr. Ahmad is not responsible for radicalizing him. He may have played a role in getting the cooperating witness to go to Afghanistan to get training, but even the cooperating witness acknowledges that, unlike what Mr. Ahmad wanted him to do, which was to return to England to complete his education, he turned away from that and was, in fact, radicalized by Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden whom he met in Afghanistan." Ahmad was extradited from the UK to the United States on 5 October 2012. The removal process took place on the evening, when Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan were taken from
HM Prison Long Lartin, to
RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, which is used by the
US Air Force, from where he was placed into the physical custody of the awaiting United States officials. Three other terror suspects in unrelated cases were also extradited at the same time. Ahmad later stated that he was "blindfolded, shackled and forcibly stripped naked" during his extradition. After spending two years in solitary confinement at a US
Supermax prison he pleaded guilty to "conspiracy and providing material to support to terrorism". In 2014, US federal Judge Janet Hall sentenced Ahmad to an unexpectedly lenient sentence In July 2015, Ahmad was released from prison in the US and returned to the UK. 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. ==Police abuse case==