The Islamist organisation Al Muhajiroun plays a major role in transforming moderate Muslims into angry radicals keen to fight and die for the cause. Photo / Reuters

The Islamist organisation Al Muhajiroun plays a major role in transforming moderate Muslims into angry radicals keen to fight and die for the cause. Photo / Reuters

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."