PRIVATE family photographs of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader, are to appear in the first biography in English of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The book includes pictures of Zarqawi with his Jordanian bedouin mother and father, both of whom are now dead. Other photographs show him shortly before his journey to become a fighter in Afghanistan and in prison in Jordan in the 1990s.

Zarqawi’s group in Iraq has been linked to numerous insurgent atrocities, including the beheading of Kenneth Bigley, an engineer from Liverpool.

The biography, Zarqawi: The New Face of Terrorism, will be published by Polity later this month. It claims that Zarqawi, as part of an attempt to build a Europe-wide network of sympathisers, has developed close links with an Islamic cleric under house arrest in Britain “With Osama Bin Laden out of circulation or incapacitated, Zarqawi . . . is probably the most important figure within the radical Islamists,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, the book’s author and a French terrorism investigator.

Brisard recounts how Zarqawi, now 37, was expelled from school. He worked in a paper plant and then as a maintenance worker before drifting into crime. According to the book: “Those who knew him in those years say that he drank like a fish and covered his body with tattoos, two practices condemned by Islam. They called him ‘the green man’ on account of his many tattoos.”

Zarqawi was later convicted for wounding with a knife. He was also arrested for shoplifting, drug dealing and a rape allegation. His mother was so concerned about his descent into criminality that she enrolled him at a local mosque.

There, under the tutelage of a radical preacher, he decided to travel to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupiers. By 1989 his conversion to radical Islam had begun in earnest.

Since then Zarqawi has spent two periods in Afghanistan and two spells in Jordanian prisons. In 2000-1 he began to build his own network based at Herat in western Afghanistan.

The book says Zarqawi has used his European network to recruit fighters to Iraq and to make contact with Abu Qatada, a Jordanian cleric now under house arrest in Britain. Qatada was described by a Spanish judge as the spiritual guide for Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden’s personal representative in Europe.

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