Father of three who praised 7/7 bombers
RADICALISED when he was 17, fanatic Abu Izzadeen came to notoriety during hate-filled speeches outside Regent’s Park mosque.
The British extremist – born Trevor Brooks – said soldiers were ‘crusaders’ who would rape and murder Iraqi women and children.
The married father of three urged a boycott of the Poppy Appeal, claiming anyone who wore a poppy to mark Remembrance Day ‘ supported the murder of Muslims’.
Izzadeen, 39, who once called the July 7 London suicide bombers ‘ praiseworthy’, was born to a respectable Jamaican family in Hackney, East London, but shed his Christian identity on the eve of his 18th birthday.
He was said to have been radicalised by Syrian cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed and hate preacher Abu Hamza at Finsbury Park mosque and joined Anjem Choudary’s Al-Muhajiroun.
The former electrician and fluent Arabic speaker spent more than a decade preaching and calling for Britain to become an Islamic state and travelled in Pakistan before the September 11 attacks, as part of Al-Muhajiroun.
In 2006, Izzadeen told then Home Secretary John Reid he was an ‘enemy of Islam’ after the minister asked Muslims to step in if they thought children were being radicalised. In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he denounced then Prime Minister Tony Blair as a ‘murderer’.
During an address to his supporters, he was filmed as he said Muslims who joined the Army should face the death penalty under sharia law, saying their heads should be ‘removed’.
Like Choudary, he has lived off the state, claiming up to £1,000 a month in benefits while living in a council house in Leyton, East London.
He joined Muslims Against Crusades, which burnt a poppy on Remembrance Sunday in 2010 and whose supporters targeted a forces’ homecoming parade in Luton.
Protests by the group and its offshoots featured chants such as ‘British soldiers burn in hell’ and banners including ‘Hell for Heroes’.
Izzadeen, who married his wife Mokhtaria in 1998, when he was 23, advertised on the internet for three more wives and said he wanted ‘more than nine children’.
The radical described himself as ‘the life and soul of the party’ in the ad on a Muslim dating site and described his personality as ‘passionate, bold, protective, witty and sensitive’.