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Hamid, who had travelled to the Pakistan-Afghan border in 2002, was arrested in August 2005 as a potential witness in the case against the 21/7 attackers. He had been a common link to all the men.

The following month, the security services began what they refer to as “electronic coverage” of Hamid’s home in Clapton, East London. In other words, covert agents broke into the property and wired it for sound.

The aim was to listen in on the Friday night meetings to which Hamid would invite his followers, after first drawing them into his orbit through his bookshop, proselytising stall at Oxford Circus or appearances at Speakers’ Corner.

One of those who approached Hamid in the West End of London, in April 2006, was an undercover police officer who became known to the group as Dawood.

The covert surveillance and the human intelligence from Dawood quickly paid dividends. High-quality sound recordings were obtained of what Hamid and Ahmet were saying to their followers, and each other, when they thought they were in private. Hundreds of hours of recorded conversations revealed poisonous sermons by Ahmet.

“Democracy is the enemy of Islam” he said, identifying Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall as potential targets.

Hamid was heard predicting “six or seven atrocities” before the 2012 Olympics. Civilians, the Houses of Parliament and the police were all legitimate targets in the mission “to implement Allah’s law”.

They were dangerous sentiments and he knew it. “It is not permissible for you to talk outside this room once it has been spoken here,” he told his recruits.

Dawood was taken to training weekends in the grounds of Jameah Islamiyah school near Crowborough, East Sussex, where Hamid tried to educate his team in the hardships they might expect in the Afghan mountains, and to the New Forest where the group practised casualty evacuation exercises.

On one trip to Sussex in July 2006, one of the group — Hassan Mutagumbwa — approached the undercover officer on Winchelsea beach and asked him for money for a one-way ticket to Africa for “a brother who won’t be coming back”.

A few days later Mutagumbwa, 22, was stopped at Heathrow as he tried to catch a flight to Nairobi with military fatigues in his luggage. He was en-route to become a suicide bomber in Somalia and is now serving a ten-year sentence for seeking money for terrorism.

Driving back through London in the late summer of 2006, the group passed Paddington Green high-security police station. Hamid shouted out of the car window: “Here is your terrorist, come and get me.”

He did not have long to wait. The authorities were biding their time — waiting for the new anti-terror legislation to be in place and for the group to be gathered together so that they could arrest all the suspects at once.

The opportunity came on a Friday night in September 2006 when Hamid had gathered his followers in the Bridge to China Town halal Chinese restaurant in South London.

They had barely finished their prawn crackers and noodles from the bargain buffet when five riot vans pulled up and 50 armed police filed through the door. The diners were ordered to put down their chopsticks while police seized mobile phones. The kitchen was closed and a dozen men were placed under arrest.

In subsequent searches of their homes a huge array of extremist material was recovered as well as a number of ball-bearing guns. One member of the group, known as Salaam Joh, has subsequently been jailed for five years for possessing a sawn-off shotgun.

A senior counter-terrorism source said: “There has always been the danger of trivialising what these people were doing. They were engaged in paramilitary training for terrorism, they talked repeatedly of fighting and killing non-believers and they rejected Muslims who did not follow their path.

“They posed a huge danger to young impressionable people who could have been lured into terrorism.”

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