For nearly 20 years, Anjem Choudary thought he was untouchable. The Islamic hate preacher stood on street corners with a microphone spewing out vile anti-British propaganda condemning Western lifestyles and promising that Islamic flags would soon fly over Downing Street.

He called for the Queen to wear a burka, drunks to receive 40 lashes, and told his increasingly fanatical Muslim disciples — some just children — that it was their duty to claim State benefits (or ‘jihadseeker’s allowance’, as he called it) to impoverish this country.

As TV cameras rolled (for Choudary is a media savvy self-publicist), few took much notice of the youngsters among the baying mob.

Indoctrinated: A girl in a burka at a Choudary rally at Central London Mosque in front of placards reading: ‘Muslims will destroy the crusade and establish the Islamic State’

But they were there: a girl, no more than seven, with a blue burka covering all but her dark eyes; a boy, not much older than her, waving a poster saying ‘UK democracy is hell’; a baby held in the arms of a shouting, pro-Choudary female protester who, herself, was obscured behind black flowing robes.

The most shocking film footage shows a bewildered toddler being wheeled in a pushchair alongside a violent demonstration in multi-cultural Brick Lane, East London, where Choudary was calling for Sharia law in Britain and a ban on the sale of alcohol at local shops and takeaways.

Warped the minds of youngsters: Choudary

Following his sentencing yesterday to five-and-a-half years in jail for drumming up support for Islamic State, the full extent of Choudary’s proselytising of the young is becoming clear. Not content with brainwashing adults, he thought nothing of using his evil words to radicalise children, too.

A boy of five who fell under his spell began to shout ‘shame’ in Arabic whenever he saw a woman in Western clothes and not covered by a burka.

This child’s brother, aged 13, expressed ‘terrible’ views supporting the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks in Paris, saying the killers were following the laws of Islam.

Their nine-year-old sister confided that she was dreaming of Syria ‘because that is where all the Muslims live . . . and England has been bad for Muslims’.

These are just some of the chilling remarks made by three radicalised British-born children to their teachers, social workers and police after their mother was jailed for trying to abduct them to join Islamic State in Syria.

The children’s alarming views have been revealed in family court documents. The truth is that 49-year-old Choudary warped the minds of innocent youngsters over two decades, inspiring many of them, as teenagers and young adults, to slip away and join Islamic State on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq.

In a ruling on the three children’s future care, a family court judge, Mr Justice Newton, said their mother was ‘intimately connected’ to hate preachers — one of whom was Choudary — and her children had been ‘exposed’ to their fanatical hate speech and copied them.

He explained that the mother — whom we cannot name to protect her children’s identities, but will call Mrs X — took her children to scores of ‘Islamic roadshows’ between October 2011 and May 2014 at different public places around London, where they stood alongside Choudary and ‘many other political extremists’.

There, according to the judgment, these children held hands with his radical followers who had either been involved in racial violence, helped to raise money on UK streets and mosques to incite terrorism or were actively preparing for ‘terrorist acts’.

Chilling influence: Choudary has links to hundreds of British jihadis — many of whom, undoubtedly, were once children who attended his rallies — and are now terrorists with IS

If the judge’s analysis is not disturbing enough, the police have revealed that Choudary has links to hundreds of British jihadis — many of whom, undoubtedly, were once children who attended his rallies — and are now terrorists with IS.

Meanwhile, security expert and Buckingham University professor Anthony Glees says: ‘He’s an extremely dangerous man. Virtually everybody who has gone off to fight for IS has been associated with him. Between 300 and 600 of them are there as a direct result of his brainwashing.’

Research by the Henry Jackson Society, a UK-based think-tank on security, shows that almost a quarter of Islamic-linked terror offenders in the UK since 1999 have been inspired by Choudary or his close associates.

Before Choudary was convicted unanimously by a jury last month (news for once he took silently with his arms crossed across his chest), he promised that if he was jailed he would 'radicalise everyone in prison'

Remarkably, it says one in ten had a personal relationship with him.

And this is the man who was sometimes given a platform to spout his views by the BBC. Investigations by the British authorities into the backgrounds of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, convicted of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in 2013, revealed the young killers regularly showed up at Choudary’s rallies, and also that the pair used a South London Islamic centre to indoctrinate Muslim children by showing them horrific videos of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers.

As for the three young siblings talked about by the judge, they are the nephews and niece of a Choudary acolyte who escaped Britain and fled to Syria while under investigation for encouraging terrorism.

But the troubling connection between Choudary and the trio of radicalised children does not end there. Their mother, the now jailed Mrs X, is a ‘prominent lieutenant’ — according to the judge — of Choudary’s wife Rubana Akhtar, who is under investigation by Scotland Yard over a women’s social clique suspected of supporting IS.

Investigations by the British authorities into the backgrounds of Michael Adebolajo (left) and Michael Adebowale (right), convicted of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in 2013, revealed the young killers regularly showed up at Choudary’s rallies

At one clandestine meeting of the group in East London, filmed during a Channel 4 investigation into IS, Mrs Choudary can be heard spouting anti-Western propaganda for two hours in front of 20 mothers and their children.

In another covertly filmed meeting, she told a group — believed to have included babies and toddlers — that the ‘good days have already begun’ because the Islamic State was thriving in the Middle East.

She is recorded accusing ‘filthy Jews’ of killing innocent Muslim women and children, and condemning the West for fighting against IS.

The judge described Mrs Choudary’s circle as a ‘clandestine group of the Islamic sisterhood’, organising talks and coffee mornings at private homes, mosques and rented rooms throughout London.

Twisting young minds: Choudary

He added: ‘But lest this might be likened to something akin to the Women’s Institute, nothing could be further from the truth.

‘These were highly organised, focused women organising attendance at extreme demonstrations.’

The events, he said, included a Burn America Flag Day outside the U.S. Embassy in London and a meeting beside the walls of Belmarsh Prison to raise money for the legal defence of the hook-handed extremist cleric Abu Hamza.

He was infamous for his blood-curdling anti-British speeches at Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, and was eventually sentenced to life for terrorism offences in the U.S.

A similar Burn America Flag Day protest organised by Choudary’s supporters was attended by Abase Hussen, the father of a 15-year-old schoolgirl who fled to Syria to become an IS jihadi bride with two of her London school friends.

Mr Hussen has admitted taking his daughter Amira — at the impressionable age of 13 — to two equally unpalatable rallies where Choudary played a key role.

The Mail has discovered that Mrs Choudary’s friend Mrs X, now 33 and a mother of four, even took three of her children to an Islamic event attended by 17-year-old Brustholm Ziamani, a London teenager radicalised by Choudary in just 12 weeks after the two met at Camberwell Mosque.

Two years later, Ziamani — still in his teens — was found guilty of plotting to behead a soldier with a hammer and a knife.

The feckless teenager and former Christian had been brainwashed by Choudary at his secret headquarters in the basement of a halal sweet shop in London’s East End.

From this hideaway, owned by his friends, Choudary spread his vile ideology to tens of thousands of adults and children, through Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Twitter. On Twitter alone, he had 32,000 followers.

Incongruously, it was from the sweet shop that Choudary sent out internet invitations to his never-ending pavement protests and rallies.

At one such gathering I went to — where (as a woman) I was put at the back of the hall with a group of his female attendees in burkas — I sat next to a girl who appeared no more than ten years old.

Wearing long dark robes, she had been brought by her veil-covered mother to the meeting in East London.

The little girl helped me to a curry during the break (telling me it might be too spicy for my palate). She later clapped with excitement as Choudary spoke of his plans to turn the UK into an Islamic utopia run under Sharia law.

The preacher’s favourite tenet at the time was: ‘The whole world one day will be under the Sharia, including Hackney and Walthamstow and Moscow and New York.

‘We have a very bright future, my dear Muslims.’ How the small girl, and other children in the audience, lapped up his words.

Just how seriously father-of-five Choudary et al took their task of polluting the minds of innocent youngsters became clear last year when counter-terrorism police raided an ‘illegal’ Islamic school in East London, which has since been closed by the Government.

The Siddeeq Academy in Tower Hamlets was run in a private house by Mizanur Rahman, a 33-year-old friend of Choudary, who stood alongside him in the Old Bailey dock in the recent trial, and was also found guilty of building support for IS in Britain.

Rahman was sentenced in 2007 to six years in prison for inciting murder and Islamic terrorism in demonstrations (often attended by Choudary) outside the Danish Embassy in London.

At Mizanur Rahman’s unregistered school, children as young as five were taught an ‘inappropriate’ curriculum heavily loaded with Islamic scriptures in overcrowded corridors and hallways.

This, of course, is the ideal education in Anjem Choudary’s view. In one incendiary speech a few years ago, he opined: ‘Next time your child is at school and the teacher asks: “What is your ambition?” they should say: “To dominate the whole world by Islam, including Britain, that is my ambition.” ’

Before Choudary was convicted unanimously by a jury last month (news for once he took silently with his arms crossed across his chest), he promised that if he was jailed he would ‘radicalise everyone in prison’.

It is some consolation that none of the inmates who cross his path will be impressionable children. They, at least, are now out of his cynical grasp.