WHAT IS AL-MUHAJIROUN ? WHO IS AL-MUHAJIROUN? WHERE ARE THE AL-MUHAJIROUN SLEEPER CELLS IN NY?

Rewind to London, Sunday, 8 September, 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 7 July London bombers. Click images for al-Muhajiroun video on the network.

Video addresses will be beamed in and letters of support are to be read. There will be one from Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas leader held in an Israeli prison for authorising the execution of two Israeli soldiers. There is another from Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, jailed in the US 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. At the time the conference, which the organisers cancelled at the last moment, raised hardly a blip on the radar of British intelligence.

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 at targets that included the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London and Britain's domestic gas network.

See video here of the BBC News report by Richard Watson on al-Muhajiroun and the Masjid al-Fatima Mosque in Queens NY were I took the crew to establish links to Mohammed Junaid Babar and al-Muhajiroun. The Mosques founder Aqeel Khan admits on camera to the terror group al-Muhajiroun's influence at his Mosque the Masjid al-Fatima aka Islamic Center of Queens and how $400,000 went misssing.

The fertiliser bomb 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.

As Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's Counter-Terrorism Command, said last month: 'In the Nineties many people believed extremists from overseas regimes who were active in the UK were, if anything, pursuing agendas against foreign governments, and posed little or no threat to the UK.' This failure allowed a dangerous global network to flourish. A network that has come back to haunt Britain and shows no sign of being dismantled.

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 from any other Muslims. But things changed when Hashmi switched colleges, leaving Stony Brook University in Long Island for the more mixed Brooklyn College, from where he graduated with a degree in political science in 2003.

It was at Brooklyn that Hashmi, 23, discovered al-Muhajiroun, inviting a member to speak at his campus. At the time the memory of the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre was hardwired into New York's consciousness. People were edgy and security services more vigilant.

One prominent Muslim radical who lived in Queens had been a particular concern. In November 2001 Mohammed Babar, a naturalised US citizen who had been born in Pakistan, attracted the interest of US 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, despite his mother having narrowly escaped from the World Trade Centre when the planes struck.

Shortly after 9/11, Babar, who had been recruited by al-Muhajiroun in 2000, disappeared off the US intelligence service's radar. He had 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, had been born in Pakistan and wanted to fight. Angered by what they saw as the West's failure to protect Bosnian Muslims in the Nineties 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 North West Frontier Province. It was there that Mohammed Siddique Khan, an al-Muhajiroun convert and the ringleader of the 7/7 plot that killed 52 people in London, learnt his murderous skills.

Other Britons at the camp in the summer of 2003 included Omar Khyam, ringleader of the fertiliser bombers. He attended the camp with Saladhuddin Amin, later to play a key role in the plot. Along with scores of other militants the pair practised making explosives, detonating devices in the camp. Until now the details of how Babar met the fertiliser bomb plotters have been hazy. But documents filed by the US authorities who extradited him from the UK, say it was Hashmi, described as one of al-Muhajiroun's top recruiters, who brought the American, 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 out to Abdul al-Hadi al-Iraqi, then head of al-Qaeda's operations in Afghanistan. The supplies included ponchos, torches and boots, useful for recruits fighting US troops in remote parts of Afghanistan.

Hashmi was arrested on 8 June 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.

A Canadian, Momin Khawaja, 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's operations in North America and Britain - links the US authorities are playing down. Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, quickly blamed British Islamists, but it is increasingly clear al-Muhajiroun's influence in the US spawned a small army of jihadists who exported the movement's ideology around the world.

As Babar, who turned supergrass against the fertiliser bombers, admitted at the trial, the US arm of al-Muhajiroun was a key component in its success. 'Most influence started in the early Nineties - Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed here in the UK,' Babar said. 'They [al-Muhajiroun] had representatives in New York. I was able to meet them on the internet. We spoke numerous times over the phone and there was a lot of literature available on the internet.'

The influence of al-Muhajiroun is apparent in the number of terrorists it allegedly influenced. The shoe bomber, Richard Reid, was seen at several al-Muhajiroun meetings in Ilford, east London, in the months before his failed attempt to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 flying between Paris and Miami. One regular visitor to the group's north London office was Asif Hanif, 21, from Hounslow, west London. On 29 April, 2003, he walked into Mike's Bar, a crowded cafe in Tel Aviv, Israel, and detonated his explosive belt, killing three people and injuring 60 others.

Haroon Rasheed Aswat, 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, (currently he is serving 15 years in a Iraq prison)a Londoner, was picked up by US Marines on patrol in Ramadi, southern Iraq, after being caught allegedly passing weapons to insurgents. Muneef is believed to have attended al-Muhajiroun lectures in London.

Press play: Present-day Britain. Somewhere in the UK 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, including Babar.

The man, referred to as at the trial as 'Imran', has been on the run since last year. He had returned to the UK 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 'Imran' had the telephone numbers of several defendants in the fertilizer bomb plot trial, as well as high-ranking al-Qaeda figures. The jury heard the plotters had approached 'Imran' to become a suicide bomber but he had bailed out at the eleventh hour, believing they would not go through with their side of the plan.

'Imran', who had been radicalised by al-Muhajiroun in Britain before linking up 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 and its followers are still out there.

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,' said 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.'

These followers, notably Abu Izzadeen, charged last month with inciting terrorism overseas, have continued to preach incendiary sermons around the country. Splinter successor groups have emerged and, despite being proscribed by the government, continue to act as conduits for young radicals.

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 the UK, three or four thousand 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 dispatch to become 'holy warriors' overseas are now 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 prioritise the most dangerous radicals. 'Intelligence suggests there are between 1,600 and 2,000 young Muslim men linked to terrorism in Britain,' said one counter-terrorism source. '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.

Answering the question may prevent further atrocities, but those charged with protecting Britain admit another successful attack is inevitable. And just as inevitably its perpetrator will have been influenced by an obscure Islamist group that appeared to have all of the answers: al-Muhajiroun.