The son of a Labor party councilor from Rochdale in the UK was arrested yesterday for attempting to join the Islamic State.

Waheed Ahmed is the 21 year old son of Labor party councilor Shakil Ahmed. He had been in Turkey trying to cross the border into Syria when he was picked up by Turkish authorities along with eight relatives, also from Rochdale.

UK security services arrested Waheed on his arrival into the UK at Birmingham airport.

An officer from the Greater Manchester Police said that police were “working to ensure the safe return of eight other people to the UK.”

He gave the specifics of the arrest, saying:

“In the early hours of Tuesday 14 April 2015, a 21-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of CPI Section 40 (1) (b) TACT 2000 (Commission, Preparation or Instigation of Acts of Terrorism) at Birmingham airport.

“A few hours earlier, on Monday 13 April 2015, a 31-year-old man was arrested for the same offence in the Rochdale area.”

In connection with the same investigation four other people aged between 22 and 47 were arrested today at Manchester airport on terrorism charges.

Radicalism has been worsening in Rochdale, which was also recently the center of another UK sex grooming scandal.

Haras Rafiq, the head of the counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation, described how Hizb-ut Tahrir, a global Islamist group with the stated goal of creating a global Islamic Caliphate which enforces sharia law as state law, has been making inroads in Rochdale.

He called the group ‘totalitarian’ and ‘fascist.’

He said that the group has “managed to get into some of the frontline services such as schools – in high schools delivering lessons as teaching assistants and also sixth form colleges, including Rochdale Sixth Form College.”

Events of around 400 people are held regularly by Hiz-ut Tahir in Rochdale, he noted.

Furthermore, although Hizb-ut Tahrir is a non-violent Islamist organization it shares the same end goal as the Islamic State and other violent Islamist organizations. This makes the transition to a more extreme group very simple.

As Rafiq noted “In some cases – quite a few cases – people join these groups and get fed up with all the talk and rhetoric and they go looking for action. They move on to other groups such as Al Qaeda or Isis.”

When the news of his son’s arrest initially broke Labor councilor Shakil Ahmed issued a statement saying that he was “shocked” and that he had thought his son was on a work placement in Birmingham.

Shakil Ahmed said “My son is a good Muslim and his loyalties belong to Britain, so I don’t understand what he’s doing there.

“If I thought for a second that he was in danger of being radicalised, I would have reported him to the authorities.

“He’s studying a degree in politics and sociology at Manchester University and has a good future ahead of him.”