But what was deadly real about Man Haron Monis was his religious fanaticism, blind ego and increasing paranoia that destroyed two innocent lives this week — and led to his own death.

He claimed to have fled Iran in fear for his life and when he was charged over the barbaric stabbing and burning murder of his ex-wife in Sydney late last year, he claimed he was being framed by the Iranian Secret Police and ASIO.

‘Fanciful” was how the prosecutor Brian Royce described it at the time.

Monis, 50, could also have been called a liar.

When he arrived in Australia on a tourist visa in 1996 to seek political asylum he claimed to have been a cleric whose liberal brand of Islam had led his first wife and children to be detained in Iran.

Had his claim been forensically tested, it may have emerged that he fled after stealing a reported $200,000 from a travel business. His ex-wife was reportedly working in a women’s university in Tehran.

Monis, then known as Mohammad Hassan Mantegh, had undertaken religious studies in Iran but was a long way from becoming an ayatollah, as he had claimed.

Iran’s embassy in Canberra said this week that the theft had been proved in his absence but with no extradition treaty with Australia, there was no way he could have been extradited to Iran to face justice.

The Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry has claimed it had warned Australia over Monis’s “psychological conditions” several times during official meetings. This could not be confirmed.

One of his first jobs in Australia was a Persian rug salesman in Perth where he smoked and was a regular gambler at the city’s casino.

INSIDE THE JUNK-FILLED HOME OF A HATEFUL MAN

He also worked for a time as a security officer but never held a gun licence although he claimed to have done target shooting practice.

Monis changed his name and by the time he arrived in Sydney he had given himself the title of “sheik”. In 2000 he was granted political asylum and in 2004 became an Australian citizen.

He set up business as a spiritual healer and met Fijian national Noleen Hayson Pal in 2003 when she saw one of his local newspaper advertisements and went to see him for his “psychic” skills. She wanted him to look into her future.

Three years later they had two sons and an increasingly bizarre relationship. They didn’t live together but he stayed overnight at her parents’ house a couple of nights a week, not providing for her or the boys.

When she later sought an Apprehended Violence Order to protect her family, Ms Pal told a court that as he got into his “Islamic activities” his paranoia grew.

“Every time he’s come to my house, he’s been very paranoid,” she told the court.

“As soon as he walks into the house, the doors have to be closed, the blinds have to be drawn, we can’t go outside.

“He’s always saying to me that people are watching, people are hearing our conversations, especially when he started getting more into his Islamic activities, running the websites.”

When terror came to Sydney

During those years — between 2003 and 2009 — he had been carrying out “spiritual healing” sessions all over Sydney. Earlier this year, seven of those women cam forward to tell shocking stories.

He had raped some of them, sexually assaulted others and used water to paint their naked breasts and bodies. He was charged with over 40 counts of sexual and indecent assault.

Ms Pal’s parents, who had initially thought him a nice polite man, had by then seen the real Monis, who they knew as Michael Hayson or Michael Hassan. Her dad, Ashouk, had built a two-bedroom granny flat in the garden to get him out of the house.

Her mother Marian Pal had stepped in when he went to slap her daughter. He would bang his head with his hand when he got angry.

Monis refused to put his name on the birth certificate of his sons. It has emerged that by then, he had been introduced by a mutual friend to the woman who was to become his third wife and allegedly his partner in murder, Anastasia Droudis, who was born to Greek Australian parents.

In June 2011 when Ms Pal finally told him to leave his key to the granny flat, pack up his things and get out, she feared he would attack her.

“He became like angry, like his face was changing,” she told the court.

About three weeks later he demanded that she meet him one night at Green Valley McDonalds. She went because the restaurant is next to a police station and gave her a measure of safety.

As her parents waited in the car with her two young sons, Monis told her: “If I don’t see the boys more than I see them now, I will make you pay even if I have to shoot you.”

Anastasia Droudis: In pictures

When the application for an AVO got to Downing Centre Local Court in 2012, Ms Pal’s parents stood by their only child, telling the magistrate what Monis was really like.

However the case was dismissed.

By then, Monis appears to have been out of control in all aspects of his life.

“He was an intensely conflicted and contradictory person,” his former lawyer Manny Conditsis said this week.

He was a loner who even in the Muslim-rich heartland of Sydney’s south west, had never found anywhere to fit in.

“He was on the fringe of the fringe,” Mr Conditsis said. ‘No community accepted him, not the Iranians, not the Muslims.”

Ms Droudis, who converted to Islam and changed her name to Amirah, helped him when he wrote hate letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers.

He was given 300 hours community service after pleading guilty and she received a two-year good behaviour bond for aiding and abetting him but Monis refused to accept he had done anything wrong.

He challenged the charges, saying they were unconstitutional and tied up many hours in the NSW Supreme Court and High Court with high-powered lawyers representing himself and most states as they argued the point.

The High Court was locked at three all.

Then in April 2013, less than a year after the magistrate threw out the charges against him over the AVO, Ms Pal was stabbed 18 times, petrol poured over her and she was set alight in the stairwell of Monis’ Werrington unit when she went to pick up the boys after a custody visit.

A court would later hear how Monis had gone to elaborate lengths to give himself an alibi.

He deliberately filmed a clock, while asking for the time, before the murder and faked a car crash outside Penrith Police station after which he claimed he had chest pains and was taken to Nepean Hospital.

Monis also claimed someone had broken into his unit and stolen a gold necklace and six antique scrolls two weeks after the murder. This intruder, Monis argued, would have had to have buzzed Ms Pal into the unit block and could have been the murderer

Monis had previously taken out home insurance and specifically listed the items he claimed were stolen in his policy.

Police alleged that Droudis, 35, had been waiting for Ms Pal and was her killer.

Monis and Droudis, 35, were charged in November last year over Ms Pal’s murder.

Initially refused bail, Monis was locked up for about five weeks at the Silverwater Jail. He claimed to have been bashed in his cell, that prison officers took away his mattress and wouldn’t let him lie down and that excrement was smeared over the walls of the cell.

He said he would never go back.

Facing the charges of accessory before and after the fact to murder and a lengthy jail sentence if he was convicted, that may may have been one of the tipping points that led him to pack a shotgun into a blue sports bag and walk into the Lindt Cafe on Monday.

Then there was his last High Court appeal on Friday. In the Supreme Court building just metres away from the Lindt Cafe, above which his own lawyers had their chambers, he was refused special leave to take his constitutional argument back before the full bench of seven judges.

He hated to lose.