State by state, police chart Muhajir's descent into world of crime

For one person at least, the claim that Abdullah al-Muhajir was planning trouble came as little surprise.

"He started to go for his gun when I went to arrest him," said police Lieutenant Charles Vitale, who held the so-called dirty bomber over a road rage incident in 1991. "That was the first time I thought I was going to have to shoot someone. He was turning 21 when I arrested him and he had no fear of pulling a gun on a police officer. You just knew he was going to turn out really bad."

Mr Muhajir, 31, was born Jose Padilla, in a Puerto Rican family with four other children whose parents lived in New York. He was a happy, chubby-faced child with a ready smile. His nickname was Pudgy.

But such childhood innocence was not to last. Police in Chicago, where his family moved when he was four, and where he later made his home in Florida, paint a picture of a hardened gang member with a long record of violence and a taste for fast cars and guns. He regularly carried a silver .38 revolver in his waistband and his forearm bore the tattoo "Jose".

Mr Muhajir's descent into crime, and allegedly from there into that of international terrorism, began in 1985 and concerned not a dirty bomb but a wristwatch and a handful of blood-stained dollar bills looted from the body of a fatally injured man left in an alley.

At the time, Mr Muhajir was just 14, but court documents obtained by a Chicago newspaper reveal he was a member of a gang known as the Latin Disciples. On one occasion he and another gang member, Andre Boulrece, attacked three men, one of whom chased them.

Boulrece turned and stabbed his pursuer in the stomach. After he fell to the ground dying, Mr Muhajir kicked the man in the head and the pair of them rummaged through his pockets and took his watch. When they were arrested, police discovered $107 in bloody bills. Boulrece was convicted of murder and Mr Muhajir of armed robbery. He was held in a juvenile detention centre until his 18th birthday.

There were numerous other arrests, for theft, burglary, assault and resisting arrest, and Mr Muhajir used various aliases. In 1991 he moved to Florida where he worked in hotels.

In October that year Lieut Vitale arrested Mr Muhajir over the road-rage affair after he had fired a shot at another motorist. That incident – and a subsequent attack on a prison officer – earned him a 12-month sentence in Florida's Broward county jail.

The authorities believe it was after that sentence that he converted to Islam, possibly because of his marriage to Cherie Stultz, a devout Muslim. The couple married in 1996 but lived apart from 1999 and divorced last year.

Quite how Mr Muhajir made the leap from Chicago gang member to alleged al-Qa'ida operative is not clear. Officials said yesterday that he became a protégé of Osama bin Laden's planned successor, Abu Zubeida, al-Qa'ida's director of operations. After travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan several times, he met Mr Zubeida after 11 September to discuss the dirty bomb plot.

Last March he was dispatched to a safe-house in Lahore where he allegedly discussed the plot with al-Qa'ida operatives.

Some of Mr Muhajir's family remain in Florida. Yesterday, at the home of his mother, Estrela Lebron, in the town of Plantation, a note attached to the door, read: "Please leave this family in peace."