Free Republic

From Gloucester to Afghanistan: the making of a shoe bomber Saajid Badat this week pleaded guilty to plotting to blow up a plane. What drove this quiet football fan to thoughts of terror? Mark Honigsbaum and Vikram Dodd Saturday March 5, 2005 The Guardian He seemed the model British Muslim citizen - a poster boy for integration whose knowledge of the Qu'ran and achievement at grammar school made Gloucester's close-knit Islamic community proud. When in November 2003 anti-terrorist police turned up at the terraced house in the Barton and Tredworth district of the city that Saajid Badat shared with his...

French anti-terror magistrates wrapped up an investigation into four Islamists who may have helped British shoe bomber Richard Reid in France. Le Parisien reports the suspects include the head of a Paris mosque, the leader of a Pakistani community and two other men. Reid spent several days in Paris before boarding a Miami-bound plane in December 2001 with explosives stuffed in his sneakers. Last year, Reid was sentenced to life in prison by a U.S. court for trying to blow up the flight. One of the French suspects, Imam Kamel Lakhram, reportedly acknowledged to French authorities Reid had slept at...

WASHINGTON — U.S. authorities brought charges Monday against a British man they claim conspired with admitted Al Qaeda (search) member Richard Reid (search) to use shoe bombs to blow up planes in midair. A federal grand jury indictment unsealed in Boston charges Saajid Badat, 25, with attempted murder, trying to destroy an aircraft and other counts related to the alleged conspiracy with Reid, who also is a British citizen and Muslim convert. Reid's attempt to blow up a Paris-to-Miami flight on Dec. 22, 2001, was thwarted by attendants and passengers after he tried to light a fuse leading to the...

Unrepentant, and convinced that Muslims across the world are the victims of American oppression, the mind of Richard Reid, the attempted shoe bomber from South London, was shown today in a letter published in a Scottish legal magazine. The letter, written by Reid from his prison cell in America on October 24, 2002, and published by The Firm magazine today, was sent to the magazine's US correspondent instead of an interview. In the letter, Reid, now 31, gave a rambling but cogent reply to a note sent to him by Noel Young, The Firm's journalist, who offered Reid the chance...

LONDON, July 31 (UPI) -- Letters from convicted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid from a super-max prison in the United States include lectures to his father about Islam and dreams of freedom. The Mirror, a British newspaper, reported that it had an exclusive look at Reid's letters to his father, Robin Reid, a Jamaican-born recovering drug addict living in a London homeless shelter. Reid berates his father for a letter telling him that his aunt, Madeleine, who brought Reid up while Robin Reid was in prison, had died and was "in a better place." "What you wrote about Aunt Lynn being...