A polite young man who loved football and Islam too

Published on Tuesday 9 February 2010 22:01

MOHAMMED Atif Siddique, whose terrorism conviction was quashed yesterday, appeared to residents in his home town of Alva as a polite, mild-mannered and softly spoken young man.

His parents, Mohammad and Parveen, are Pakistani immigrants who married in Rochdale before moving from Lancashire to Scotland in the 1980s. They ran a newspaper shop on the western edge of Alva, adjacent to their seven-bedroom home, and won respect for their polite manner and hard work.

Associates described them as conservative, observant Muslims who attended mosques in Stirling and Alloa.

Siddique worked hard at Alva Academy. His former head teacher described him in court as a "model pupil" . He on to study computing at Forth Valley College in Alloa before undertaking a two-year HND in information and communication technology at Glasgow Metropolitan College.

His social circle was mostly young Muslims, and he played football with a local team drawn mostly from the sons of other British Pakistani shopkeepers in Clackmannanshire.

He graduated with only a Higher National Certificate rather than an HND in the summer of 2005 and found employment in a series of low-paid call centre jobs. He was unemployed for four months before his arrest.

Students at the Met recalled him trawling through Arabic websites portraying "freedom fighters" and suicide bombings. In between shifts at the Response Handling Team call centre in Ibrox, Glasgow, he would study websites at the nearby library.

At home, his interest in Islam caused friction with his parents, who worried about the amount of time he was spending alone in his bedroom looking at websites. They were unhappy that the teenager had grown a beard. Siddique, in turn, argued that his parents should not sell alcohol in their shop as it was haram, or contrary to Islam.

Family relations were further strained in 2005, when Siddique's father forcibly cut off his beard, at his mother's insistence. Aged 19, he left home and went on a trip to England with a religious group from Glasgow Central Mosque, where he is believed to have spent time studying Islam.