Anwar come home

Hasham Khan is a frustrated man. While the deaths of four British Muslims fighting for the Taliban have hit the headlines, he says his son has been a largely forgotten prisoner of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan for two and a half years.

Straining forward from the cushions of his sofa, he talks about his anger that the government isn't doing more to secure his release. "I would like to ask the prime minister, Tony Blair, why he can't do for my son what he did for that woman, Yvonne Ridley. They put pressure on the Taliban and she was released in a week. My son has been there for two and a half years. What about his release?"

Whether you would accept that the government did much to win the freedom of the foolhardy Sunday Express journalist - and her mother certainly wouldn't - you cannot doubt Khan's anger. He is convinced that his son is the victim of double standards; that the government values his freedom less than that of Ridley.

Khan says he sent his son, now 25, to Pakistan three years ago to kick his heroin addiction. A £100-a-day habit had led him to start dealing to other users and stealing from his family. Anwar was to study at the Jamia Asharafia school in Lahore, a vocational college, not a religious madrassa, but he disappeared from his uncle's home in Attock before he had even enrolled. The next his family heard of him was that he had been captured by the Northern Alliance.

In interviews supervised by his captors, Anwar has told journalists that it was a lifelong passion for firearms that took him to a Taliban training camp outside Kabul: "I was in a class of 50 people. I used to run every day with a log on my back and some bricks on my back and I learned about the Kalashnikov and things." From there he was taken to the frontlines "as an observer" but was press-ganged into fighting. It was then that he was captured.

"I didn't intend to work with the Taliban. I just came to train - to keep away from the drugs and maybe rehabilitate myself." He denies being a supporter of Osama bin Laden. "He hasn't recruited me and I don't want to be recruited. I just want to get out of this mess and go home."

His family is wary of believing what he says while he is in the hands of the Northern Alliance. His brother Ajmal maintains that it was drugs that took Anwar to Afghanistan. "I reckon he went there to buy cheap heroin for himself. The Taliban might have offered him a regular supply of smack if he joined up." Asked if he thought his brother might have volunteered to fight out of a sense of adventure, he replies that he doesn't think his brother would have had the guts.

It is indeed ironic, with so much media attention paid to the fundamentalist minority within Britain's Muslim community, that the only Briton held by the Northern Alliance for fighting with the Taliban seems totally devoid of any ideological or religious motivation. "No different to any other Pakistani-British kid" and "not particularly religious" is how his brother Ajmal describes him. Instead, Anwar sounds like a product of his particularly northern British background. Born and brought up in Stoneyholme, Burnley, a deprived area that saw much of the recent rioting, Anwar's early life could be that of any young man from either side of the town's divided community. Leaving school at 16 after a series of exclusions and with a record of truancy, he found it impossible to find full-time employment. He sank into drug addiction and was frequently in trouble with the police.

Since his capture, the Khan family have had almost no contact with Anwar. They've spoken to him once, when a CNN camera crew visiting the prison lent him their satellite phone in 1998. And they've received one letter, brought back from Afghanistan by the BBC reporter Sarah Nelson, who interviewed Anwar last month for Radio 4's Today programme.

News of Anwar has come from a variety of sources. On a pilgrimage to Mecca, his mother befriended a Pakistani family whose son had spent time in the same Northern Alliance prison as Anwar. Freed after the payment of a ransom, he told her about the ill-treatment the prisoners had to endure, including torture by electric shock. Amnesty International confirms that the Northern Alliance has a long history of human rights abuses; the Geneva convention covers only prisoners captured in external conflicts, not civil wars.

Three months after Anwar's capture, members of the Northern Alliance made contact with the family, demanding a ransom of $6m, to be handed over in a location in France or the Ukraine. "We didn't have $6m," says Ajmal, "but after we'd confirmed that these people were who they said they were - through Afghan refugees in London - we pursued it, to see if it would be possible to reduce the amount." Hasham Khan went to Pakistan to meet some Afghans who claimed to represent the Northern Alliance. "My father paid about $4,000, but basically he got ripped off."

Another approach, this time through the Russian mafia, who are partners with the Northern Alliance in smuggling heroin through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, also proved fruitless. The Russians could only persuade the Northern Alliance to drop their price to $1.5m, still far beyond the family's means.

More conventionally, the Khans have tried to pressure the foreign office to seek Anwar's release. They are being helped by Shahid Malik, who went to school with Anwar and is a member of the Labour Party's national executive, and his father Rafique, Burnley's deputy mayor. They share the family's frustration but believe the present circumstances present the best opportunity so far to win Anwar's freedom. "Given that Britain and the Northern Alliance are allies at the moment, I'm confident that if the foreign office turned its attention to Anwar's case, it could have him home sooner rather than later," says Shahid Malik.

But despite the Maliks' optimism, the foreign office is refusing to actively seek Anwar's release, though its officials concede that it is in informal contact with the Northern Alliance representative about his case. The FO's line is that events have delayed progress, though it has succeeded in gaining assurances that parcels will be able to reach Anwar from now on.

The opportunity to send his son parcels is unlikely to satisfy Hasham Khan. Since his son's imprisonment, his health has deteriorated, as has his wife's. "I have become a diabetic, while my wife is sick with a heart problem. It has been such a long time, all the time thinking, all the time worrying, all the time crying."