KEY POINTS:
REWIND TO LONDON, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1996.
Al Muhajiroun, an obscure Islamist organisation, has booked the London Arena in Docklands for a conference dedicated to "the struggle for Khilafah", the creation of an Islamic state.
Speakers are to include Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, Al Muhajiroun's leader, who 10 years later will flee Britain to Lebanon after praising the July 7 London bombers.
Video addresses will be beamed in and letters of support read, one of them from Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas leader held in an Israeli prison for authorising the execution of two Israeli soldiers. Another is from Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, jailed in the United States for plotting to set off bombs in New Jersey and New York.
There will also be an address on behalf of a man called Sheikh Al Jihad, better known as Osama bin Laden, who a month earlier had publicly declared war on America.
Conference organisers say bin Laden's address will refer to the heroes of the Taleban. It will talk about Muslim suffering, about injustice, about the need to take action.
For Al Muhajiroun this is a coming-of-age moment, the day the group emerges from its hinterland and on to the world stage.
At the time, the conference, which the organisers cancelled at the last moment, raised hardly a blip on the radar of British intelligence. But now it can be revealed how Al Muhajiroun became the incubator of a global terror network that played a decisive role in radicalising the five "fertiliser bomb" plotters jailed for life for planning a multiple bombing campaign in Britain.
The plotters were typical of those Al Muhajiroun found and indoctrinated. The parents of many of those the group attracted pleaded desperately with their sons to break away. But Al Muhajiroun's appeal was irresistible. Hundreds embraced Bakri's call to jihad and, with Al Muhajiroun's help, were dispatched to terror training camps in Pakistan.
The bomb trial heard how the five - Omar Khyam, Waheed Mahmood, Anthony Garcia, Jawad Akbar and Saladhuddin Amin, all in their 20s, from the counties surrounding London, and interested in sport and studying - were transformed from moderate Muslims into angry radicals keen to fight overseas.
At the heart of their conversion lay Bakri and his network of lieutenants whom he despatched to campuses, mosques and prayer centres.
"While extremists are not always terrorists, terrorists are always extremists," says Professor Anthony Glees, director of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies. "The fertiliser bomb trial has given us the smoking-gun evidence that groups like Al Muhajiroun have had an important part in radicalising young British Muslims and that this can create terrorists."
With hindsight, the conference should have set off alarm bells. But the reaction from on high to the group's emergence was muted. Few politicians wanted to be seen to criticise ethnic and religious minorities.
Instead, the rantings of Bakri, his acolyte, Abu Hamza, the hook-handed cleric now serving seven years for inciting murder, and their growing number of followers were dismissed as the headline-grabbing posturings of a lunatic fringe.
The security service's assessment was that those brainwashed by Al Muhajiroun would die in some corner of a foreign battlefield. This failure allowed a dangerous global network to flourish.
FORWARD: NEW YORK 2002.
Everyone who knew Syed Hashmi says he was a good kid, born in Pakistan but brought up in New York's gritty borough of Queens. Friends recall Hashmi as a caring, bright young man whose devotion to Islam was passionate but not of the sort that marked him out.
But things changed when Hashmi switched colleges, leaving Stony Brook University in Long Island for the more mixed Brooklyn College. It was there that Hashmi, 23, discovered Al Muhajiroun, inviting a member to speak at his campus.
At the time the memory of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre was hardwired into New York's consciousness. People were edgy and security services vigilant.
One prominent Muslim radical who lived in Queens had been a particular concern. In November 2001, Mohammed Babar, a naturalised US citizen born in Pakistan, attracted the interest of intelligence when he openly declared in a TV interview that he was willing to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. "My loyalty will forever be with the Muslims," he said.
Shortly after 9/11, Babar, who had been recruited by Al Muhajiroun in 2000, disappeared off the US intelligence service radar. He fled to Pakistan where he stayed at Al Muhajiroun's office in Lahore before buying an apartment in the city's Eden Heights suburb in 2002.
Over the next two years the flat became a temporary home to a conveyor belt of radicalised British Muslims, many of whom, like Babar, were born in Pakistan and wanted to fight.
Angered by what they saw as the West's failure to protect Bosnian Muslims in the 90s war in the former Yugoslavia, their sense of grievance was heightened by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the turmoil in Chechnya and Kashmir.
Many of those who stayed there ended up at the Malakand training camp hidden in Pakistan's northwest.
It was there that Mohammed Sidique Khan, an Al Muhajiroun convert and the ringleader of the 7/7 plot that killed 52 people in London, learned his murderous skills.
Others there in the summer of 2003 included Omar Khyam, ringleader of the British fertiliser bombers.
He attended the camp with Saladhuddin Amin, later to play a key role in the plot. With scores of other militants the pair practised making and detonating explosive devices.
Documents filed by the US authorities who are extraditing him from Britain say it was Hashmi, described as one of Al Muhajiroun's top recruiters, who brought Babar into the organisation, where he later met the British fertiliser bomb plotters.
Hashmi, who moved to Britain from Queens in 2003, allegedly allowed his London flat to be used to store supplies and money that Babar was shipping to Abdul al-Hadi al-Iraqi, then head of al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan.
Hashmi was arrested on June 8 last year as he tried to board a plane from Heathrow to Pakistan, carrying thousands of pounds in cash.
If convicted in the US he faces up to 54 years in prison. His lawyers say he will deny all the charges and that much of the evidence against him is conflicting.
Momin Khawaja, a Canadian who is said to be a close associate of Babar and Al Muhajiroun, will soon stand trial in his own country for his alleged role in the fertiliser bomb plot. Both trials threaten to shine new light on the links between Al Muhajiroun operations in North America and Britain, and it is increasingly clear that Al Muhajiroun's influence in the US spawned a small army of jihadists who exported the movement's ideology around the world.
The shoe bomber, Richard Reid, was seen at several Al Muhajiroun meetings in east London in the months before his failed attempt to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami.
One regular visitor to the group's north London office was Asif Hanif, 21, from Hounslow, west London.
On April 29, 2003, he became Britain's first suicide bomber when he walked into Mike's Bar, a crowded cafe in Tel Aviv, Israel, and detonated his explosive belt, killing three people and injuring 60.
Haroon Rasheed Aswad, another prominent member of Al Muhajiroun, was arrested in 2005, accused of attempting to set up a terror training camp for British and American jihadists in Oregon.
In 2005, Mobeen Muneef, 25, a Londoner, was picked up by US Marines on patrol in Ramadi, southern Iraq, after being caught allegedly passing weapons to insurgents. Muneef had attended Al Muhajiroun lectures in London.
If the US needed reminding of the threat Al Muhajiroun posed, it needed only to read a leaked memo by FBI agent Kenneth Williams. Written on July 10, 2001, the memo warns that bin Laden was attempting to send recruits to civil aviation colleges in the US.
The document notes that the head of Al Muhajiroun, Omar Bakri Mohammed, had received faxes from bin Laden in which the al Qaeda leader urges Muslims to take action against the West: "Bring down their airliners. Prevent the safe passage of their ships. Occupy their embassies. Force the closure of their banks."
PAUSE: EAST LONDON, THE 90S:
Few people can fathom how young British men are capable of turning on their country and killing innocent people, even if it sometimes means their own deaths. The five fertiliser-bomb plotters were not loners, hiding to nurture a discernible grudge against society. Three were married and two had children.
Ed Husain, a former member of Hizb-ut Tahrir, the radical group from which Omar Bakri Mohammed split to set up Al Muhajiroun, is one of the few who knows how the conversion process from moderate to radical works. Like most of the bombers, Husain grew up in a moderate Muslim family, but was radicalised in his teens.
"I grew up with a sense of being both Muslim and British," Husain said. "I went to a multicultural primary school and I really enjoyed it. But when I went to Stepney Green secondary school the atmosphere changed. It was a single-sex school, with boys predominantly from Bangladesh.
"There was nothing British about that school. It could have been in Karachi. My only choice at school was to become a gang member or become an Islamist."
Husain, who last week published a book about his experiences, The Islamist, says his first exposure to radical Islam came in religious education lessons at the school: "We read a basic textbook that linked Islam and politics as the same.
"Prayers were being led by people linked to the East London mosque. When my father heard they were holding these sessions he asked me to stop praying at school. I refused." By then Husain was hooked.
"Eventually I was invited to the mosque. The atmosphere was radically different to my parents' mosque. There were young, dynamic Muslims. They were people I could identify with."
By then Husain's parents were deeply unhappy with the company he was keeping and tried to persuade him to leave the mosque, known for its extreme brand of Islam.
"My parents knew I was betraying what they had raised me on. After trying to convince me, they gave me an ultimatum - leave Islamism or leave the house. People at the mosque told me it was a test from God.
"So one night I wrote a note to my parents and left for the mosque. My mother phoned at nine the next morning. The caretaker answered and said I wasn't there. I was sitting right beside him. I could hear my mother crying. That was my first moment of doubt about these people. But by then I couldn't leave. My family had lost and I had won. It was a process of indoctrination."
Husain joined Hizb-ut Tahrir after meeting Bakri. "People at the mosque could identify problems but couldn't offer solutions," he says.
"Bakri offered a direct solution - the establishment of a Muslim state with a foreign policy of jihad. There was a powerful message: this was the only way to be a Muslim."
The British Government continues to resist demands to proscribe Hizb-ut Tahrir, despite continued concerns about its influence expressed by the Pakistan and US authorities.
PRESS PLAY: PRESENT-DAY BRITAIN.
Somewhere in the country hides a deeply disturbed 27-year-old would-be suicide bomber, a close friend of Asif Hanif, who killed himself and three others in Mike's Bar in Tel Aviv, and an associate of several fertiliser-bomb plotters.
The man, referred to at the trial as Imran, has been on the run since last year. He returned to Britain after a spell in a Pakistani jail, where he had been interrogated by MI6 over his links to suspected terrorists.
When he was arrested in 2005, Pakistani intelligence found he had the telephone numbers of several defendants in the fertiliser-bomb plot trial, as well as high-ranking al Qaeda figures.
Imran, who was radicalised by Al Muhajiroun in Britain before linking with its office in Lahore, also admitted to the Pakistani authorities that he had met two of the 7/7 bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shezhad Tanweer, at a jihadist training camp in late 2004.
His story should act as a warning: Al Muhajiroun's legacy lingers. Bakri may be in exile but he still spreads his message from his luxury flat overlooking the Mediterranean in Beirut, where his neighbours include the Egyptian ambassador.
"Al Muhajiroun are still a threat because Bakri's followers continue to operate under different names giving leaflets out at mosques and universities," says Dr Irfan Al Alawi, director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism.
"Bakri continues to preach his sermons via an internet chatroom from his exile, which means his evil ideology is still being practised by his followers, who are part of a new group called Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah".
Even Bakri acknowledges his former organisation's continuing influence: "Al Muhajiroun was a political party. We were not a militant group.
"During my 20 years as an Islamic preacher in Britain, 4000 people heard me speak. I cannot be responsible for everything these people do. Yes, I spoke of jihad, but people have taken it out of context."
The security service's greatest fear is that the hundreds, possibly thousands, of young men Al Muhajiroun helped to send overseas to become "holy warriors" are returning to Britain, ready to turn their sights on domestic targets.
The trend was predicted as far back as 2002 by Hassan Butt, a former Al Muhajiroun member who attended terror training camps in Pakistan.
"These were people I was meeting and these were people who decided to return to Britain to become sleeper cells," Butt said.
The question is how many of those who returned will become active. It is an ugly conundrum for counter-terrorism services as they attempt to work out the most dangerous radicals to put on their priority list.
"Intelligence suggests there are between 1600 and 2000 young Muslim men linked to terrorism in Britain," one counter-terrorism source said.
"At any one time 20 will be talking about jihad overseas. Do you pick them up or wait and see?
"What nobody can answer is what happened to Mohammed Sidique Khan to turn him from a radicalised young man to someone who wanted to kill himself. We just don't know."
Answering the question may prevent further atrocities, but those charged with protecting Britain admit another successful attack is inevitable.
Just as inevitably, its perpetrator will have been influenced by an obscure Islamist group that appeared to have all of the answers - Al Muhajiroun.
- Observer
Spreading the deadly message
Al Muhajiroun was formed in 1996 and used public meetings and lectures in radical mosques to establish a network that stretches around the world.
From an office in north London, the organisation maintained a presence in the United States and Pakistan, gaining a reputation for extremist rhetoric.
Under the leadership of Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the group recruited young men from mosques, gyms and universities.
Many members travelled to Pakistan to train in jihad camps before being sent to fight in Kashmir or Afghanistan or, as in the case of the July 7 bombers and the fertiliser plotters, returning to Britain to plan domestic attacks.
Al Muhajiroun officially disbanded in 2004.
A month after July 7, fearing investigation by anti-terror police, Omar Bakri left Britain for Lebanon.
Experts believe the organisation splintered into successor groups, which continue to operate in Britain.
