WHEN IDIOTS LARP AS CIVIL-RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: Somali man whose deportation from the UK was stopped when plane passengers staged a mutiny is a GANG RAPIST who attacked teenage girl.

But the passengers who thought they were doing a good deed were unaware that the man they were defending had been sentenced to nine years in jail for his part in a vicious gang rape of a teenage girl – and that another member of his gang later fought for Islamic State in Syria.

Today The Mail on Sunday can reveal how Ahmed and three other youths preyed on a 16-year-old stranger after she became separated from her friends during a night out in London’s Leicester Square, in August 2007.

In a planned attack, they lured her back to a flat in Crouch End, North London, by pretending her friends were waiting for her there – then gang-raped her.

The gang, aged between 18 and 20, were caught when neighbours heard the girl’s cries for help and rang police.

All four men denied rape, despite DNA evidence. They were found guilty at Wood Green Crown Court and each jailed for nine years. Police detective Emma Bird said at the time: ‘The sentences given out by the judge reflect the seriousness of this offence.’

Ahmed, 18 at the time of the rape and living in Clerkenwell, North London, is thought to have been granted refugee status after arriving in Britain from war-torn Somalia as a boy.

Nice gratitude, Ahmed. The passengers should be named publicly, and prosecuted.