Message of hate for new intake

In packed meetings across the UK, young British Muslims are being fed a message of anti-Western hatred.

Al-Muhajiroun, which claims to have recruited hundreds of people for "holy wars" in Chechnya, Bosnia and Afghanistan, has been busy since 11 September.

The group's leader Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, himself under police investigation for allegedly inciting racial hatred, has been banned from all university campuses across the country amid concerns that students were being intimidated and pressured into signing up to his fundamentalist doctrine.

But the ban has not prevented Bakri and his closest followers from spreading a hardline message outside mosques and in public meetings advertised on the group's website. The Evening Standard has been to two al-Muhajiroun meetings in recent days and witnessed the persuasive way Bakri appeals to young men and women who are looking for a cause.

At one in Whitechapel, dozens of Muslims, mostly in their twenties, heard Bakri's deputy Abu Aziz warn the West to "prepare the bodybags".

The men and women sat on opposite sides of the room, divided by a 5ft screen so the men could not see the women. But they were united in laughter when Aziz ridiculed American claims to have found a passport belonging to one of the hijackers in the ruins of the World Trade Center.

And his indoctrination met no opposition as he told the gathering: "You have to choose if you side with Islam, America, or sit in the middle as a hypocrite. And there's nothing worse than a hypocrite.

"America can kill Muslims but they can't kill Islam. If they attack Afghanistan, they'll have to prepare the bodybags."

Aziz called on the group's followers to call relatives in Pakistan and stir up a military coup, urging them to warn loved ones that nuclear missiles might be on the way.

Similar rabble-rousing meetings have taken place in Birmingham, Leicester, Derby and Manchester since 11 September and lessons are held each week in Tottenham and Barking.

Travelling with Bakri to a meeting at an Islamic centre in Luton, we heard him tell eight young men acting as his bodyguards that the US was engaged in a war against Islam, where Muslims were seen by the West as "evil people they can't live with".

For many disenfranchised young Muslims, the message of militancy is a powerful one. A 21-year-old engineering student who attended Bakri's lesson said afterwards: "I want to be a martyr, to die for a just cause because I would end up in paradise."

Bakri smiled at his convert and said: "There is nothing better in Islam than to be a martyr, to die for a just cause."