Aimen Dean

In August 2022, Dean claimed his five-year-old daughter's school, St George's School, Edinburgh, had discriminated against the family due to his past. Dean plans to leave the UK, where he was granted permanent residence, with his family to find a school for his children in the Middle East.

He was pointed to a 13th-century Fatwa by Ibn Taymiyyah. He researched the Fatwa which was about the Mongol invasion and their use of human shields when besieging cities; it was clear to him that this was no justification for killing civilian bystanders. He believes the concept of Jihad has been changed by al-Qaeda, and its goal is to start a world war against the West.

Aimen Dean (Arabic: ایمن دین) is a former member of al-Qaeda. In 1998, he was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service and became an MI6 spy.

Following Bosnia, Dean was invited to Kandahar to swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and join al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, he trained al-Qaeda recruits in the basics of Islamic theology, history and the essentials of religious practice. He was worried by the 1998 United States embassy bombings and asked Abdullah al-Mohaja for the religious justification.

Dean was born in Saudi Arabia. By the age of 12, he had memorised the Quran (thereby becoming a Hafiz). Following the death of his mother he sought solace in Sayyid Qutb's In the Shade of the Koran. He was part of an Islamic Awareness circle at Omar Bin Abdulaziz Mosque in Khobar, where one of the instructors was Yusef al-Ayeri. In 1989, his eldest brother Moheddin went to fight in Afghanistan for three months. At 15, he travelled to Bosnia to participate in the Bosnian War with a friend from the circle Khaled Ali Hajj who had returned from fighting in Afghanistan.