Now Donna Traverso, 25, despises her former stepfather Abu Hamza al-Masri for shattering her family and abandoning her at the age of 5.

In her first interview, she tells The Times how the Egyptian disappeared with her beloved little half-brother, Mohammed, and told him that his mother was dead. He tried to lure her away at the same time, she said.

She is convinced that he duped her mother, Valerie Fleming, into wrongly naming him on the birth certificate as Donna’s biological father because he was trying to gain the right to stay in Britain.

Her words come on the eve of Abu Hamza’s latest bid for freedom. Tomorrow his lawyers will apply for leave to appeal against convictions for soliciting murder, inciting racial hatred and possessing offensive material.

Ms Traverso, now married with three children and living in Hertfordshire, said: “How dare he lecture ordinary working people about Western morals.

“He left me without saying goodbye, destroyed my family and told his own son that his mother was dead. He has not had the decency to try and explain why he left or why he took Mohammed. He is a coward and a hypocrite, and deserves to rot in jail.”

Her earliest memories of him are far from the ranting Finsbury Park preacher with only one eye and a hook for a hand. Back then he was a broad, 6ft (1.8m) bouncer working at a Soho nightclub and was known as Mostafa Kamal Mostafa.

She remembers him as the perfect father as he relaxed at home in jeans and a leather jacket.

“He was kind, and played with me. He was always telling me that I was his little girl, even as I got older and started to question whether he was really my dad,” she said.

Abu Hamza met Donna’s mother in March 1980. He was 21 and working as a receptionist in a hotel where she was living. She already had a child and was pregnant with Donna.

Ms Fleming’s complicated domestic arrangements did not put him off. In May that year they married and moved into a council flat in Roehampton, southwest London. When Ms Fleming’s baby was born in September, Abu Hamza was named on the birth certificate as Donna’s father.

Today, Ms Traverso sees this move as highly suspicious. She believes that her mother was tricked by Abu Hamza into illegally putting the wrong man’s name on her birth certificate.

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