Gregg and Natasha Avery

Gregg Avery, the 41-year-old founder and mastermind of SHAC, has been involved in animal rights protesting since he was a teenager. He married Heather Nicholson after they met at protests against veal exports at Coventry airport in 1995 before divorcing her and marrying another committed animal rights campaigner, Natasha Dallemagne, in 2002. Both have previous convictions for animal rights-related offences, but are now facing the prospect of substantially longer prison terms than they have experienced before. Natasha Avery was friends with Nicholson before and after she replaced her as Gregg's wife – all three reportedly lived together for a period – and it was the two women who helped him establish SHAC in 1999. Natasha Avery’s activities included joining her husband on visits to City financial institutions where they would give false names in order to obtain information about HLS while using a covert camera to film the company's offices.

Heather Nicholson

Nicholson, who was raised in Wales, is former nanny who got her first taste of animal rights protesting during the campaigns against live veal exports in the mid-1990s, where she met her future husband Avery. The 41-year-old life-long vegan used to work for the RSPCA but left because she “just couldn't take it" when they put animals down. She was paid £75 a week to work full-time for SHAC and the trial heard that she had a managerial role at the top of the campaign. In April last year, a month before she was arrested, she said while making a speech in the City: "I've got 50 injunctions, an ASBO, I get harassed, arrested, raided. I'm still here. You will not shut me up forever."

Daniel Wadham

Sources close to the investigation believe that Wadham, 21, was being groomed for a leadership role at the heart of SHAC for a year from the summer of 2005. He reduced his involvement with the organisation somewhat following his imprisonment for affray after shouting abuse at a family who displayed a pro-hunting sticker in their car. Until then he was living either at the SHAC headquarters in Hampshire or in Heather Nicholson's house but by the time of his arrest Wadham had moved away to Brynmair, Wales. He told the trial that he was proud of being in SHAC, something that “will stay on my CV”, and claimed: “I’m not an international blackmailer, I’m not an ALF operative...I always though that what I did was legal.”

Gerrah Selby

Selby is Scottish-born and spent four years living in the south of France as a teenager. Former teachers at the private international school she attended there, where she was a prefect, describe the 20-year-old as a "delightful and extremely thoughtful young lady" who got excellent results and had a "burning idealism for a better world". She deferred her place to study zoology at Edinburgh University to work with SHAC. She then shared a house in Church Crookham, Hampshire, with Daniel Amos and was believed to have been in a relationship with him until the end of 2006, although she has never confirmed this. An old MySpace profile declares that the ALF “liberate tortured souls” and “rock my boat”.

Daniel Amos

The 22-year-old has been in custody since pleading guilty to conspiracy to blackmail on July 30 and since then he has used his MySpace page to request donations to fund his vegan lifestyle in prison via his MySpace page. His Amazon wishlist includes Gerry Adams, Malcolm X and Winston Churchill. Amos went to school with Laurie Pycroft, who established Pro-Test when he was 16 to support the building of an animal research laboratory in Oxford, and posted his address and phone number online.

Gavin Medd-Hall

The 45-year-old former computer technician from Croydon was SHAC's IT expert and was a member of the campaign hierarchy for several years. He was so dedicated to his online research that on Christmas Day 2003 he was sending emails detailing new potential targets. He also helped compile secret reports on SHAC activities in Britain and abroad.

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