Nightclub bouncer who became the cleric of hate

Abu Hamza was born Mustafa Kamel Mustafa in Alexandria, Egypt, on April 15, 1958, to a middle-class family. His father was an Egyptian naval officer and his mother a primary school headmistress.

Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri is a name he adopted after his return to Britain from Afghanistan and Bosnia in 1995. Sheikh means "leader," while Abu Hamza means "father of the lion hunter". Al-Masri means "the Egyptian".

Hamza studied civil engineering in Alexandria but dropped out and moved to Britain in 1979, aged 21.

He said: "I thought the West was a paradise where you could do anything you wanted."

Religion was the last thing on his mind.

"I was not a good Muslim before I came to Britain," he said in a rare interview. "I was very undisciplined."

Hamza met his first wife, Valerie Traverso, at a west London hotel where he was working as a receptionist. She was pregnant by another man and was still married. The marriage at Westminster register office in 1980 was bigamous, although it is unclear whether Hamza knew that.

Hamza took on both children and Valerie was soon pregnant with a child of their own, Mohamed Kamel. At the time Hamza worked as a bouncer at a Soho nightclub.

The marriage did not last. Valerie, who has remarried and lives in Stevenage, Herts, says he was an "easy-going" family man. "He had a bubbly personality. He was always enormous fun and took great care of me."

Hamza says it was his second wife who "pushed" him into Islam at the age of 23 or 24. They married in a Muslim ceremony in 1984 and he started a civil engineering course at Brighton in 1986.

His second son was born the same year and he went on to have seven children.

Hamza's turn towards extremism began on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1987 when he met Abdullah Azzam, the leader of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

He returned home and continued studying, graduating in 1989 and joining a building company.

His first job was at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, demolishing an old office, building a car park and repairing the perimeter.

He kept the plans and boasted that they would be of great use to a terrorist. His second job was on an underpass in the Strand, London, but the company went out of business in 1991.

Hamza says he packed up his belongings and decided to emigrate to Afghanistan.

There he was in charge of an £11 million project, paid for by the Saudis, which built factories, schools and mosques and helped refugees after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. In 1993 he lost his hands and an eye in an accident while clearing a path through a minefield.

"A mine exploded when I stuck a pole in the ground to mark the edge of what I thought was a safe path," he said.

By then a British citizen, he returned to this country severely disabled and set about turning himself into a Muslim cleric. He helped set up a group called the Saviours of Shariah (Muslim law).

When he had recovered fully, he went to what had by then become another Muslim hotspot: Bosnia. When the Dayton peace accord was signed in 1995, to Hamza's disgust, he returned to Britain.

There are no formal qualifications for becoming a Muslim preacher but with Hamza's growing authority he was welcomed as a regular preacher in Luton.

Finsbury Park Mosque in north London had been completed in 1990 after the Prince of Wales visited the rundown area and approached King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who contributed £1.3 million to the project.

Hamza claims that he was invited to the mosque to sort out tensions between the majority Bangladeshi community, the Arab community and the Pakistani trustees. He quickly became the dominant figure there.

He first came to the attention of the security services in 1999 when he was arrested and questioned over the kidnap of tourists in Yemen. Four of them, including three Britons, were killed in a rescue attempt.

Hamza's son, Mohamed, and stepson, Mohsen Gailan, were arrested and jailed in Yemen. Phone-tap evidence showed that Hamza had called them. However, that evidence was not admissible in British courts.

Hamza continued preaching at Finsbury Park. When police raided the mosque after a terrorist plot was uncovered and the Charity Commission closed it down, Hamza preached in the street.

By 2004 David Blunkett, then home secretary, announced that Hamza was to be stripped of his citizenship.

But the process had become bogged down in legal appeals when Special Branch officers arrested him under an American warrant and searched his home in Shepherds Bush, west London.

There they found hundreds of tapes ready for distribution as well as the Encyclopaedia of Afghani Jihad, which formed the basis for his trial.