Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty’s six-year campaign was run by a core of highly organised, middle-class extremists who moved from lawful protest to radicalisation and crime:

Gregg and Natasha Avery A former tailor who was described as “looking like an accountant on dress-down Friday”, Mr Avery, 41, was a founder and mastermind of the group. He has been involved in animal rights since he was a teenager. From beginnings as an anti-hunt protester, he went on to become one of the highest-profile and most notorious extremists in the country. He has been in prison several times before, as has his second wife, Natasha, 39. After pleading guilty to conspiracy to blackmail earlier this year, they face the prospect of a much longer period behind bars. Posing as potential investors in Huntingdon Life Sciences, the couple visited City institutions while using a covert camera. Their image of respectability and their calculated targeting of financial support and logistical lifelines were the key to their success

Heather Nicholson Gregg Avery’s first wife, the 41-year-old was SHAC’s other founding member. She was raised in Wales and is a former nanny and lifelong vegan. She met Avery during protests against veal exports at Coventry airport in 1995. Although he divorced her and married Natasha in 2002, they remained close. The trio’s living arrangements — it was reported that they all shared a house – has been the source of speculation. Personal feelings did not reduce her passion for the cause, and she took a full-time, managerial position within SHAC while living on £75 a week from campaign coffers. In April last year, a month before she was arrested, she said: “I’ve got 50 injunctions, an ASBO, I get harassed, arrested, raided. I’m still here. You will not shut me up for ever”

Gavin Medd-Hall a former computer technician from Croydon. Aged 45, he was SHAC’s IT expert and was so dedicated to his online research that on Christmas Day 2003 he was sending e-mails detailing new potential targets

Gerrah Selby deferred a place at the University of Edinburgh to volunteer for the SHAC campaign. Selby, 20, was the Scottish-born daughter of a diver and had been a prefect at a private international school in France. Her teachers described her as a “delightful and extremely thoughtful young lady” who got excellent results and had a “burning idealism for a better world”. A MySpace profile from that period declares that the Animal Liberation Front “liberate tortured souls” and “rock my boat”. But few of the young people in France shared her passion and her mother, Deanne Selby, an IT consultant from Chiswick, noticed her excitement at returning to the UK in summer 2006 and meeting SHAC activists who apparently thought like her. They quickly “became Gerrah’s family”, she said

Dan Amos Aged 22, he is the son of a clerk and a building society manager with whom Selby shared a house in Church Crookham, Hampshire. Sources close to the investigation believe that the pair were in a relationship until the end of 2006, although Selby has not confirmed this. Amos, a former classmate of Laurie Pycroft, who established ProTest when he was 16 to support the building of an animal research laboratory in Oxford, has been in prison since pleading guilty to conspiracy in July. His Amazon wish list, which includes Gerry Adams, Malcolm X and Winston Churchill, paints a picture of a politically conscious, if perhaps confused, young man

Daniel Wadham The third young activist. Sources believe Wadham, 21, was being groomed for a leadership role in 2005 when he was living either at headquarters in Hampshire or Nicholson’s house. Wadham was jailed for affray in 2006 after shouting abuse at a family with a pro-hunting sticker in their car. On his release, he moved to South Wales but told the trial that being in SHAC “will stay on my CV”

Times Recommends

• An officer and a gentle woman
• Dame Helen Mirren is worthy of the Epidaurus
• Foods that can help to prevent swine flu