An associate of Welling hate preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed for 28 months for knocking a schoolboy unconscious because he cuddled his girlfriend in the street.

Michael Coe, a Muslim convert, has a long record of violent offences starting when he was 16, including assaults, burglary, robbery and violent disorder.

The married father of two was convicted in August of attacking the boy after he took exception to the 16-year-old cuddling his teenage girlfriend in Newham, east London, in April.

The 35-year-old was radicalised in prison by al Qaida terrorist Dhiren Barot in 2007 while serving an eight-year term for firing a shotgun at police during an arrest.

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Anjem Choudary.

Sentencing him at Southwark Crown Court, Judge Michael Gledhill QC said: "At the time of these offences you either held extremist views or views that were getting very close to extremist views.

"And I have no doubt at all that these views were nurtured in prison and probably outside prison by your association with convicted extremists in prison, and perhaps out of prison."

He added: "You stopped to reprimand them, and you were acting as a self-appointed enforcer of your interpretation at the time of how Muslims should behave."

The judge said he had concluded this for two reasons. "Firstly, when you told the boy to let the girl go, you asked him how would he feel if someone did the same to his sisters.

"When he protested that he was doing nothing wrong, he showed you his school tie to let you know that he was just a schoolboy.

"You then asked him, and then her, whether they were Muslim. They both denied that they were.

"Why? Because they were frightened of what you would do if they told you the truth, that they were in fact Muslim.

"Denying their religion shows just how threatening you were when they said they were not Muslim."

The judge continued that the second reason he believed Coe was policing how he thought young Muslims should behave is because he was involved in a similar incident in 2013.

He was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment after seeing a Muslim woman talking to a group of men and telling her that it was against Islam.

Coe, also known as Mikaeel Ibrahim, has attended a number of extremist demonstrations, including protests over the banning of niqabs in France and the values of Sharia law.

He became a close associate of convicted hate preacher Choudary, who attended Mulgrave Primary School in Woolwich and founded the banned organisation al-Muhajiroun, of which Coe was a member.