Saajid Muhammad Badat (born March 28 1979) is a British student. He is currently awaiting sentence after admitting conspiring to blow-up an aircraft.

Saajid Badat is the child of Muhammad and Zubeidah Badat, both of whom immigrated to the UK from their home in Malawi in the 1970s. Their first child Saajid was born at Gloucester maternity hospital on March 28 1979. He attended St James Church of England primary school, and later won admittance to The Crypt, a highly regarded fee-paying grammar school in Gloucester. Teachers there describe him as mature and committed, and in 1997 he graduated with four A-levels. Badat decided to study to become an Islamic scholar and teacher.

His studies began at an Islamic college in Lancashire, and from 1999 he attended a madrassa in Pakistan. There, investigators believe, Badat became radicalised and came under the influence of Al-Qaida sympathisers. It is believed he trained in Pakistan and possibly in neighbouring Afghanistan. Evidence suggests that he either met Richard Reid there, or that the two shared the same handler (perhaps Nizar Trabelsi). Badat returned to the UK in early 2001.

After his return Badat, like Reid, set about obtaining duplicate passports from British consulates (court documents claim Badat was in the British embassy in Brussels doing so on September 11th 2001). Both Reid and Badat returned to Pakistan in November 2001, and reportedly travelled overland to Afghanistan. There both were given "shoe bombs", casual footwear adapted to be covertly smuggled onto aircraft before being used to destroy them. Later forensic analysis of both bombs showed that they both contained plastic explosive (Badat's contained PETN, Reid's TATP) and that the respective lengths of detonator cord had come from the same batch (indeed, the cut mark on Badat's cord matches exactly that on Reid's). The pair returned separately to the UK in early December 2001.

On their return, both maintained contact with their handler(s) in Pakistan, using a system of telephone cards and email accounts. Soon after this, Badat emailed his handler, saying he was unsure if he would proceed with the scheme. Nevertheless he booked a flight from Manchester to Amsterdam, in preparation for taking a US bound flight from there. Reid did likewise, booking a flight to Paris and thence to Miami. On December 22 2001 Reid boarded his flight, but Badat did not.

Following the failure of Reid's mission and his arrest and conviction, Badat remained silent. He appears to have cut ties with his handler in Pakistan, but kept the shoe bomb at his parents' home (the detonator under his bed, the explosive in a hallway cupboard). Acting on secret intelligence, police searched his parents' Gloucester home in November 2003. There they found the concealed bomb parts (they had clearly anticipated doing so, having already evacuated more than 100 families from houses in the surrounding area) and arrested Saajid Badat.

On February 28 2005 at the Old Bailey in London, Badat pled guilty to involvement in a conspiracy to destroy a US bound aircraft. Saajid Badat will be sentenced at a later date.

References

• The Times newspaper, March 1st 2005
• BBC News story of 28th February 2005