BBC MagazineThe two men who killed Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich have been convicted of murder and now face life in prison. Their journey towards violence is still being unravelled.
Michael Adebolajo never expected to see his 29th birthday. But he did - and it came the day after he told an Old Bailey jury he wished police had shot him in the head.
As he lay bleeding from a bullet wound in his arm, sprawled on the carriageway at Artillery Place, yards away from the mutilated remains of Fusilier Lee Rigby whom he had just killed, Adebolajo was still trying to deliver his message.
"Please let me lay here," he moaned as a paramedic assessed his wounds. "I don't want anyone to die. I just want the soldiers out of my country."
Morphine dulled the pain of a bullet hole in his bicep. He decided to give the ambulance team his arm. He mumbled that Allah had given it to him and now it was theirs.
"I wish the bullets had killed me so I can join my friends and family."
Adebolajo's original friends and family were not in the forefront of his mind the day he cut down a man down on the streets of London.
He came from a Christian family in Romford on the border of London and Essex. He had plenty of white friends, one of whom was Kirk Redpath, an Irish Guard who was killed by an insurgent's roadside bomb in Iraq.
Like his co-defendant, Adebolajo's family were hard-working Nigerian immigrants.
His parents would take him to church every Sunday and he was taught by his mother how to pray. He learned at the knee of a Jehovah's Witness called Ron - a man who he said had a massive influence on his religious outlook.
He was a bright boy - and his parents urged him to go to university. But he also had a problem with authority, unless, as he told his trial, it was his parents or God.
While he was trying to make his way in his studies, he was also developing his political and religious worldview. One of his defining childhood memories was the death of a nephew.
The young boy grieved - and concluded that academic studies might be relevant for mortal life, but "greater success" would be found in entering paradise.
By his late teens Adebolajo concluded that Islam could answer his questions - and he converted during the first year of his politics degree at Greenwich University. All around him there were protests against the devastation of the Iraq war - and Adebolajo shared that anger.
"It was the Iraq war that affected me the most," Adebolajo told the jury in Court Two of the Old Bailey. "I saw Operation Shock and Awe and it disgusted me. The way it was reported was as if it was praiseworthy, saying look at the might and awe of the West and America. Every one of those bombs was killing people."
Michael Adebowale, six years Adebolajo's junior, had a troubled upbringing. While the older Michael had entered his teenage years debating the religious and political direction of his life, Adebowale's was already out of control. By the time he was 14 he had become involved in gangs in south-east London.
Steve Adebiyi was one family friend who tried to intervene after an appeal for help from the teenager's mother.
"She brought the boy and I sat him down," said Mr Adebiyi. "I said, 'you are a young man, you have a future, look at the situation... Why are you following these non-entity people?' He was just so quiet... and said 'thank you uncle', and then he left."
Adebowale's criminal associations were soon to have fatal consequences. In January 2008, Michael Adebowale was now dealing drugs and he was looking after a flat that was being used as a crack den.
Lee James, a professional bare-knuckle fighter and addict, came to buy a hit of crack and then launched a ferocious attack on Adebowale and the two other youths who were with him.
James plunged a kitchen knife into the neck of the first youth in the flat. It was sheer chance it didn't kill or paralyse him.
Adebowale looked on in terror as the second youth, Faridon Alizada, launched at James to defend both of them. The trial judge later said it was a "hopeless mismatch" and Faridon was cut to pieces before Adebowale's eyes.
Finally, James stabbed Adebowale twice before fleeing the scene.
Lee James was jailed for life for Faridon's murder. Adebowale was convicted of drug dealing - and ultimately jailed for eight months in a young offenders' institution.
But the attack left more than physical scars. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and began suffering periods of acute mental illness, including delusions, such as hearing voices. This mental decline would come to play a key part in his later trial for Lee Rigby's murder.
Adebiyi says that in the aftermath of the stabbing, Adebowale fled Woolwich and wasn't seen for months.
When he later returned to his family in Woolwich, he did so as a Muslim. The police don't know when the Michaels, Adebolajo and Adebowale, first met, but it may have been around this time, given they were both converts in the same part of town.
The older Michael had by now been long kicked off his politics degree and had initially occupied himself by protesting against Western foreign policy alongside al-Muhajiroun.
Back in 2003, the group, now banned under counter-terrorism laws, was led by Omar Bakri Mohammed. He fled the UK in the wake of the 2005 London bombings and is now living in Lebanon.
The group had a considerable presence in Greenwich and the preacher claims that Adebolajo converted after coming to one of his prayer stalls in south London.
Adebolajo's and Bakri's accounts don't quite tally - but there is no doubt that the young man became involved with the organisation. He didn't stand meekly at the back.
In 2006 he joined a solidarity protest at the Old Bailey for Mizanur Rahman, a Muslim man accused of calling for the killing of British soldiers. Things got heated and Adebolajo ended up with a 51-day jail sentence for assaulting a police officer.
The following year, with al-Muhajiroun now rebranded as Muslims Against Crusades, a reference to British soldiers in Islamic countries, the BBC filmed Adebolajo standing behind Anjem Choudary, the group's leader after Bakri fled the UK.
And in 2009 he was seen again - this time marshalling a protest at a mosque trying to face down a demonstration by the English Defence League.
But then he says he went his own way. Adebolajo told his trial that he ideologically split from al-Muhajiroun.
line break
Al-Qaeda-inspired jihadists believe that Muslims cannot be at peace in the West because the West is at war with Muslim lands. The logical endpoint of that thinking is that adherents must either migrate to Islamic lands - or resort to violence because there is no "covenant of security" protecting them and their people.
In October 2010, Adebolajo had had enough of the land of disbelievers and he headed to where he thought he would find a pure form of Sharia rule - Somalia.
There, the militant al-Shabab group had formed an alliance with al-Qaeda and it had the government's forces on the back foot.
The country's porous southern border with Kenya was the entry point for the Westerners al-Shabab was inviting to join them - and Adebolajo followed a path trodden by other Brits.
He headed north from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to a small fishing village close to the border. There, he and four other men waited for facilitators to whisk them across a sea channel to the welcome embrace of al-Shabab.
But it didn't work out. Someone alerted the police - and Adebolajo and the others ended up in court back in Mombasa.
Full Story & Video:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25424290Anthea: It is a lot of reading but the background is interesting and informative - the black gangs of London are very dangerous
