A Portsmouth man accused of trying to join Islamist fighters in Syria has become the first person in the UK to be convicted of a terrorist offence relating to the conflict. A jury at Kingston Crown Court found Mashudur Choudhury guilty of preparing for acts of terrorism after a two-week trial. But what exactly was Choudhury up to - and why does this conviction matter?
If there is one thing that is true about Mashudur Choudhury, it is that he is a liar and a fantasist.
Throughout excruciating evidence in his two-week trial, the jury heard how he had:
faked a cancer diagnosis
used prostitutes abroad
invented a fake business
created multiple online personalities
But the prosecution said the accounts he had held with Twitter and other social media - written in the style of mujahideen warriors - revealed the person Choudhury really wanted to be.
The father-of-two is one of six men from Portsmouth who went to Syria in 2013. He is the only one to so far return. He claimed that he never intended to fight, but was looking for an opportunity to move his family abroad to escape what he said were failures in his home life.
Relying on a wealth of information gleaned from Twitter and other social media, prosecutors said Choudhury had broken terrorism laws because he had sought to intervene violently in the country's internal affairs for an ideological cause - the establishment of an Islamic state.
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