According to Jordanian intelligence reports provided to The Associated Press in Amman, Mr. Zarqawi was jailed in the 1980's for sexual assault, though no additional details were available.

"He'd say, 'You bring the food; you clean the floor,' " recalled Khalid Abu Doma, who was jailed with Mr. Zarqawi for plotting against the Jordanian government. "He didn't have great ideas. But people listened to him because they feared him."

They say he grew up in rough-and-tumble circumstances and adopted religion with the same intensity he showed for drinking and fighting, though he became far less a revolutionary mastermind than a dull-witted hothead with gruff charisma.

One night while they were camping in a cave, he recalled, Mr. Zarqawi shared a special dream. He said he had seen a vision of a sword falling from the sky. "Jihad" was written on its blade.

The Russians were his No. 1 enemy, but this, like many other beliefs, would change behind bars. In the wing where Mr. Zarqawi lived, ideologies scraped up against one other. But cellmates said he shied away from politics. Instead, he pumped iron. Cellmates remember his barbells, made from pieces of bed frame and olive oil tins filled with rocks.

His firmness was his attraction, fellow inmates said, his remoteness his power. By 1998, when a prison doctor, Basil Abu Sabha, met him, Mr. Zarqawi was clearly in charge.

"He could order his followers to do things just by moving his eyes," Dr. Abu Sabha said.

His religious views became increasingly severe. They had been marinating in a stew of militant beliefs served up by the imams and sheiks in the iron bunks next to him. He lashed out at cellmates if they read anything but the Koran.

Mr. Abu Doma said he got a threatening note for reading "Crime and Punishment."

"He spelled Dostoyevsky 'Doseefski,' Mr. Abu Doma said, laughing. "The note was full of bad Arabic, like a child wrote it."

In February, American officials in Baghdad released a 6,700-word letter - outlining a terror strategy to drag Iraq into civil war - that they said had been found on a CD from Mr. Zarqawi to Al Qaeda's leadership. But people who know Mr. Zarqawi wonder if he was the author. They said the lengthy political analysis, the references to seventh-century kings and embroidered phrases like "crafty and malicious scorpion" do not sound like him.



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/international/middleeast/13zarq.html?pagewanted=all&position=