American-born Taliban fighter travelled under Irish guise

There's a story doing the rounds in Afghanistan about the Irishman who fought for the Taliban, and it isn't a joke.

John Walker, the young American who fought against his own country's troops, told anyone who asked him that he was Irish, according to the formal charges brought against him this week.

Walker appears to have taken to heart the advice from his Pakistani extremist masters to hide his true origins, leading CIA agents, who interrogated him after his capture last November, to ask if he spoke "Irish".

He wasn't entirely fibbing, either. As a teenager, Walker may have paraded around his native San Francisco in a turban and flowing robes, but his background was Irish-American.

Baptised a Catholic and raised by an Irish-American father and a Buddhist mother, he began his remarkable odyssey from Bay Area dropout to devout mercenary after converting to Islam in 1997, at the age of 16.

In April 1998, Walker travelled to Ireland with his father, Frank Lindh, for a one-week holiday. Lindh wanted his son to learn more about the country from which his grandparents emigrated, but John insisted on wearing his robes everywhere.

Once, in a restaurant, a group of schoolchildren asked Walker if he was "in a play". He laughed, his father has told Newsweek magazine.

At one stage, Walker's father took a snapshot of his son posing in front of an Irish butcher's , underneath a sign advertising pork and bacon, which Muslims are forbidden to eat.

Later that year, he travelled to Yemen to learn Arabic. With further trips to Chechnya and Pakistan, Walker disappeared into the world of Islamic extremism. After the September 11th attacks, his father worried for his son and showed snapshots of their Irish holiday around mosques in San Francisco.

Walker, who met Osama bin Laden and was aware of the attacks on New York and Washington, was identified in December when he was taken into custody by US forces in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. His interrogation by CIA agent Johnny Spann was captured on videotape, and shows a bearded, exhausted Walker refusing to answer questions. Minutes later, Spann was killed in a prisoner uprising. Walker was shot in the leg as US marines put down the uprising. He now faces trial in a civilian court in the US.

This isn't the first spurious "Irish" involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts. In 1986, a former US assistant secretary of state, Robert McFarlane, travelled to Iran on an Irish passport in the name of "Sean Devlin".

Mr McFarlane was later pardoned for his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal but the use of the passport was never explained.