BRITAIN: The arrest of Abu Hamza on a US extradition warrant is the latest chapter in the saga of one of Britain's most controversial - and hated - figures.
Mr Hamza (47), an Egyptian civil engineering student who emigrated to Britain in search of a better life, is famed for his missing eye and hook hand, which he claims he lost while clearing landmines in Afghanistan.
In a few years he has gone from being linked to a civil war in Yemen to allegations of being a front for Osama bin Laden's campaign against the west.
The cleric, who preaches outside Finsbury Park mosque in north London, has caused outrage with his sermons castigating Britain and the invasion of Iraq as a "war against Islam", claiming the September 11th attacks on the US were a Jewish plot and calling the space shuttle disaster "a punishment from Allah".
For many people he is a bogy figure, representing their worst fears about Islamic fundamentalism. For others, he is simply a publicity-seeker, courting controversy for the attention it gives him.
But it was a quiet and typically western life he looked to have settled for when he married a British woman, Valerie Fleming, in 1984. He worked in a Soho nightclub to fund his civil engineering studies.
Living a life full of western values, Hamza gained a reputation for heavy drinking.
But throughout the 1980s, he began slowly to turn towards the most fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran. It has been suggested that the racial abuse of his son turned him into a critic of western society.
Hamza returned to Egypt in 1990 after divorcing his wife and reinvented himself as a Muslim "holy man" or sheikh.
He travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, then the centre of a civil war following the Russian retreat. It is unclear if Hamza fought in the jihad. But thanks to his British passport he returned to the UK in the early 1990s with a missing hand and missing eye.
In 1996 he re-emerged at Finsbury Park mosque, preaching jihad. He was about to become one of the most controversial Muslim figures in Britain.
In January 1999 three British tourists were killed in Yemen, drawing attention to the civil war between fundamentalists and a secular government which accused Mr Hamza of using his mosque to provide Islamic warriors.
Allegedly leading a cell called Supporters of Sharia, he was accused of sending his son, Mustafa Kamel, to Yemen, where he and five other British Muslims were convicted on terrorist charges. Yemen said it wanted him extradited.
Following the September 11th attacks in the US, he said: "Many people will be happy, jumping up and down at this moment."