A Jamaican-born Islamic cleric, who had a strong influence over one of the July 7 bombers, was extradited back to his home country today, four years after being convicted for inciting racial hatred in the UK.

Abdullah el-Faisal became the first person in more than a century to be convicted under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act when he was found guilty of soliciting murder and causing racial hatred in 2003. At the time police admitted they did not know how many young, impressionable people he could have turned towards terrorism.

Three years later, the official Home Office narrative of the July 7 bombings recorded that el-Faisal's exhortations to violence had found a willing audience in Jermaine Lindsay, who killed himself and 26 others on an Underground train near King's Cross in the 2005.

Lindsay, also from Jamaica and also a convert to Islam, was found to have attended at least one lecture by el-Faisal and and to have listened to tapes of other sermons. During the preacher's trial, recordings were heard of him telling his audiences to kill Hindus, Jews and other non-Muslims like "cockroaches".

The Home Secretary, John Reid, said that el-Faisal was put on a flight to Kingston, Jamaica, at noon today. "We are committed to protecting the public and have made it clear that foreign nationals who abuse our hospitality and break our laws can expect to be deported after they have served a prison sentence," he said.

“We will not tolerate those who seek to spread hate and fear in our communities.”

El-Faisal, 43, was deported after reaching the parole date in his seven-year sentence. He returns to Jamaica more than 20 years after leaving the Caribbean, where he was born William Forrest, the second of four children in a fervently Christian family in St James on Jamaica's western coast, near Montego Bay.

On leaving Jamaica in 1983, he travelled first to Guyana, where he took a course in Arabic, before studying at the Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Mohammed University in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where he first heard the teachings of Osama bin Laden and other practitioners of militant, Wahhabi Islam.

El-Faisal arrived in the UK in 1992 and married a British biology graduate, Zubeida Khan, soon afterwards. Over the following years he set up himself up as a lay preacher at Brixton Mosque, at the time one of London's most controversial mosques, and started touring the country, giving explosive sermons to crowds of up to 500 people.

His preaching came to the attentions of police by accident, when tapes of his sermons were found in the car of a suspected rapist in Dorset in late 2001. During subsequent searches of specialist Islamic bookshops and el-Faisal's rented house in Stratford, East London, police found recordings of him saying:

"This is how wonderful it is to kill a kuffar (a non-believer)... You crawl on his back and while you are pushing him into the hellfire you are going into paradise."

During his four-week trial in 2003, followers came to the Old Bailey and watched as the court heard el-Faisal's voice exhorting young Muslims to accept the deaths of women and children as "collateral damage" and to "learn to fly planes, drive tanks... load your guns and to use missiles". His trial was also notable for a rare attempt to bribe a British judge. During the proceedings, Judge Peter Beaumont, QC, received a letter from Glasgow offering him £50,000 to throw the trial.

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