WASHINGTON - BILL Ayers, thrust to the centre of the US presidential election over the weekend, is a 1960s leftist who founded a radical violent gang dubbed the 'Weathermen' before reinventing himself as a college professor.
The Weather Underground movement, classified by the FBI as a 'domestic terrorist organisation,' carried out a series of attacks in protest against the Vietnam War, including on the Pentagon and the US Capitol.
The group mainly targeted buildings, but in sporadic attacks, and a bungled 1981 robbery not involving Ayers, the group was responsible for the deaths of several policemen.
Ayers, 63, escaped prison when charges were dropped in 1974 due to FBI misconduct. He told the New York Times in an article published on September 11, 2001 that he felt no regret about his actions.
'I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough,' he was quoted as saying, before condemning the report and saying on his website that his memoirs, Fugitive Days, were intended as a 'condemnation of terrorism'. Ayers is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, a prolific author on educational matters and former advisor to the Chicago mayor John Daley.
Reports of Ayers' links to Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama surfaced earlier in the year but were given new impetus on Saturday by an investigation by the New York Times flagged on the paper's frontpage.
The 2,000-word article detailed instances where Mr Obama had come into contact with Ayers, either through their anti-poverty and education community work in Chicago or sporadic social contacts.
The two first met in 1995, when Ayers worked to bring to Chicago the Annenberg Challenge, a US$50 million (S$72.7 million) school grant, and then-community organiser Obama was recruited for the effort.
They met again shortly after when Ayers hosted a campaign event in his home and then-Illinois state senator Alice Palmer chose Mr Obama as her successor.
Ayers and Mr Obama subsequently served as board members on a charitable foundation, The Woods Fund, from 1999 to 2001.
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt recently told CNN television that the pair have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr Obama became US senator in 2005.
The two live in the same Hyde Park neighbourhood of Chicago and, Mr LaBolt said, they last met in a chance encounter on the street over a year ago.
The New York Times report has been seized on by Mr Obama's opponents for saying that the senator has 'played down his contacts with Ayers' but the article concluded that 'the two men do not appear to be close.' CNN said that they and 'other publications, including the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, The New Yorker and The New Republic, have said that their reporting doesn't support the idea that Mr Obama and Ayers had a close relationship.'
Mr Obama has called Ayers 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was eight years old'. In its article published on Saturday, the New York Times detailed the most notorious of the Weathermen attacks.
In 1970 in San Francisco, a bomb killed a police officer and severely hurt another.
The same year, an accidental explosion in New York killed three radicals and in 1981 an armed robbery in Nanuet, in New York state, left two police officers and a security guard dead.
Ayers is married to Bernardine Dohrn, a former Weather Underground fugitive who gave herself up to Chicago authorities in 1980 after eleven years on the run.
They have two children but also brought up the child of Weathermen collaborators who were imprisoned for the Nanuet bank robbery.
Ayers, the son of a power company boss, is now shorn of his long curly hair from the 1970s and 1980s, but still wears an earring, recent photos show.
The New York Times says he has a tattoo on his neck of the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings by the group.
He has a website, billayers.org, on which he blogs about politics and other subjects, letting both friends and foes post comments. -- AFP