posted 03-24-2014 08:05 AM            

This year Ahad returned there with the BBC for the first time, uncertain how he would be received.

Only a year after his triumphant return from space, the Russians had withdrawn from Afghanistan, he had been appointed deputy civil aviation minister and the mujahedin were closing in on Kabul.

He left on a hastily arranged business trip just days before the Soviet-backed government collapsed. In the orgy of violence that followed, he would most certainly have been a target as one of the most famous faces of the Communist era.

But on his first trip back to Afghanistan for 25 years, he has barely arrived when President Karzai's office rings, inviting him for lunch.

"He was very kind," Ahad says afterwards. "He told me straight away that even though he was fighting against the Soviets when I went to space, he still felt very proud and happy."