Noor was born in Moscow in 1914 to an Indian father, Hazrat Inayat Khan and an American mother, Ora Ray Baker.
Her father was a Sufi preacher and musician and left his home town of Baroda to take Sufism to the west.
He met Noor's mother at the Ramakrishna Mission while on a lecture tour in California.
Hazrat Inayat Khan was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, the famous 18th-century ruler of the kingdom of Mysore.
Noor was brought up in Paris and the family moved to London just before Paris fell to the Germans in 1940 during the Second World War.
In London, Noor joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and was later recruited for the Special Operations Executive, a secret organisation started by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
She was the first woman radio operator to be flown undercover to Paris and worked from there for three months under the code name Madeleine.
However she was betrayed, arrested and finally executed in the infamous Dachau concentration camp in Nazi Germany.
Though she was tortured and interrogated, she revealed nothing, not even her real name. Her last word as she was shot was “Liberte!” (Freedom). She was only 30.
Noor was posthumously awarded Britain's highest honour, the George Cross while France awarded her the Croix de Guerre.
In 2006, President Pranab Mukherjee, the then defence minister, visited Noor's family house outside Paris and described her bravery and sacrifice as “inspirational”.
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