His father worked for John Lewis, his mother is a school dinner lady. But the story of Aine Davis is anything but ordinary. For Davis was the extremist militant at the center of a sensational trial last week in which a student was acquitted of trying to smuggle €20,000 (£16,000) to him in her knickers.
Davis, 30, chose last year to turn his back on the leafy west London streets where he grew up. Nine months after this photograph was taken, Davis is likely to still be in Syria or possibly Iraq. He may even be dead by now.
The UK-based Sunday Telegraph has pieced together elements of Davis’s life that led to a young boy from Hammersmith becoming a Middle East terrorist. It is a journey that took him from being a petty criminal to a drug dealer who converted to Takfiri ideology, becoming further radicalized during a spell in jail.
Last week, Davis’s wife, Amal El-Wahabi, 27, from Harlesden, north-west London, was convicted of funding terrorism after a trial at the Old Bailey. But an old friend from school, Nawal Msaad, also 27, was cleared by the jury after she told the court she had no idea the money, hidden in her cloths as she tried to board a flight to Istanbul, was to be used towards terrorist aims.
Police are now investigating Davis’s links to other extremists in London. Officers are trying to trace the network which raised the €20,000 to send to him in Syria. One man has reportedly been arrested and questioned over supplying the money to El-Wahabi to give to Davis.
The pair travelled to Yemen, where Davis enrolled at a Takfiri indoctrination school but El-Wahabi fell pregnant and the couple came back to London. Two months before their child's birth on New Year’s Eve 2009, the couple split up. It was another two years before they got back together again. By then Davis had embarked on further travels to the Middle East, visiting Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage, and then Yemen, Egypt and Qatar.
According to reports, thousands of foreign terrorists are fighting the Syrian and Iraqi governments in a bid to exacerbate the situation in both Arab nations.
NTJ/MB