For many, with his blind eye, hook hand and wild beard, Abu Hamza was a cartoon figure, a figure of fun as much as hate, the caricature of an Islamic bogeyman.

After the end today of his trial at the Old Bailey, when he was sentenced to seven years in jail after being found guilty of soliciting to murder, inciting racial hatred and other offences, Abu Hamza can no longer be considered a pantomime villain.

Indeed, as the driving force behind the Finsbury Park mosque, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism in the late 1990s and beyond, he became one of the most dangerous men in Britain.

Born Mostafa Kamel Mostafa in Alexandria, Egypt, on April 15, 1958, Abu Hamza was the son of a naval officer and a primary school headmistress. After studying civil engineering, he left for Britain in 1979, where he initially found work as a nightclub bouncer in Soho.

In 1980, he met and married an Englishwoman, Valerie Traverso, who complained later that he had become increasingly radicalised during their marriage. When the couple divorced in 1984, Abu Hamza kept custody of their son, Muhammed.

Abu Hamza remarried the following year, eventually fathering seven more children, and was granted British citizenship in 1986, on the basis of his previous marriage.

This was the period of the Iranian revolution and the fight of the Afghan mujahidin against Soviet occupation, the apparent turning point for Abu Hamza came in 1987 when he met Abdullah Azzam, the founder of the mujahidin, on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

After graduating from Brighton Polytechnic, Abu Hamza worked as an engineer on a construction project at Sandhurst military college - and still had plans to the college when he was arrested two years ago.

He emigrated to Afghanistan in 1991, where, by his own account, he lost his arms and an eye in a landmine explosion in 1993, after which he returned to Britain.

Abu Hamza's trial heard how he travelled to Bosnia during the end of the Balkan wars to joint the Arab mujahidin. He began to come to prominence in the British Muslim community when he started preaching at a mosque in Luton in 1996, moving to Finsbury Park mosque the following year.

His first brush with the law came when he was arrested in 1999 over alleged bomb plots in Yemen, for which his son received a three-year sentence in Yemen itself. Abu Hamza himself was never charged.

After today's trial the Metropolitan Police released for the first time photographs of items seized from the mosque in January 2003 as part of a separate inquiry into a terrorist plot.

The items have never been unveiled so as not to prejudice proceedings against Abu Hamza, but include CS spray, a stun gun, three blank firing pistols, a dummy gun, a chemical warfare suit and hundreds of blank forms, passports, credit cards and cheque books.

Among those who had worshipped at the mosque during Abu Hamza's tenure was Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States over the September 11 attacks in 2001, which the cleric notoriously praised.

Abu Hamza was suspended from the mosque in 2002 after a Charity Commission investigation, but carried on preaching there until it was closed down after the police raid in January 2003. After that, he took his sermons to the streets outside.

He was arrested on a US extradition warrant in 2004 after Washington, increasingly frustrated at Britain's failure to act against the cleric, said that it wanted to charge him for facilitating terrorism and trying to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon. He still faces extradition on those charges.

Five months later, British prosecutors charged him with 15 offences, of which he was found guilty on 11 counts today.

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