Mohamed Hassan Manteghi, who 18 years later would be known to the world as Martin Place hostage-taker and terrorist Man Haron Monis, claimed in 1996 to be a senior Shia mullah, or cleric, and a dissident poet and heavyweight spy.

He said he was on the run from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, having downloaded valuable information from its computers; and that his wife and two daughters were held hostage as a result of his defection.

The Ministry of Information is among the most feared and hated of all secret services, and the deadly instrument of the world’s biggest state-sponsor of terrorism.

For Iranians living safely in Australia as refugees, this meant the newcomer Manteghi — who said he had first-hand inside information about the 1996 bombing of Saudi Arabia’s Khobar Towers, which killed 19 US servicemen; the 1992 Israeli Embassy bombing in Buenos Aires; and plans to assassinate Pope John Paul II — had blood on his hands.

And they believed him. He spoke classical Persian, suggesting he was a highly educated man of religion. Any Iranian knew that it was the clerics who ran and staffed Iran’s intelligence service.

He began calling himself Ayatollah Manteghi Boroujerdi, the last name taken from his birthplace in western Iran. Local Iranians found him and his story repulsive; and Manteghi’s attempts to reach inside their community were rejected, for fear he was an agent of Iran.

The authorities were no doubt intrigued. Could this man give a rare insight into the secretive world of the Iran’s ruling mullahs, who had locked arms with Hezbollah and were waging anti-US and anti-Israel terror campaigns across the world?

The type of visa Manteghi used to get to Australia is hidden in Immigration Department files and will not be released — if at all — until an investigation ordered by the Prime Minister is completed at the end of this month.

Manteghi told Iranians in Sydney that he had come on as a representative of the government on a business visa, investigating oil and gas trade opportunities.

Later, he would tell lawyers who represented him in various court cases that he had fled Iran and gone via Malaysia. But at that time, as Iranian asylum-seekers were starting to look towards Australia, it would have been tough to procure an instant visa from the Australian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur.

The truth is unclear but, either way, Manteghi obtained a visa and flew legally to Sydney, where he overstayed and, in 1996, sought Australia’s protection.

By outing himself within the refugee networks as a defector — even before he wore chains outside the NSW parliament in 2001 — Manthegi had set in train a public anti-Iranian narrative designed to ensure that Australia could not send him home, because he would certainly be jailed, tortured and most likely hanged.

Unlike boat arrivals, people who came by plane were not sent to detention centres. They were allowed free on bridging visas until their slow-moving claims were dealt with.

This was the case with Iran’s Sheik Mansour Leghaei, who arrived in 1994.

When he landed, Leghaei was no sheik — he’d come on a business visa as a halal meat inspector, later gaining religious standing (“sheik” simply means low-ranking cleric). The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation believed he was a plant, sent by Tehran to build a pro-Iran network in Australia.

It would take Leghaei a full 16 years to exhaust all appeals before he finally gave up and went home, on the eve of his deportation, in 2010. The point is, if you didn’t come by boat, you could drag things out for years.

Yet Manteghi got a bridging visa, and then a permanent protection visa, with ease.

By 1997, Amnesty International had bought his story wholesale and was forcefully urging the Immigration Department that he needed refugee protection as cleric, spy and a poet who had dared challenge his government.

Amnesty referred to a passage on page 72 of his 1995 poetry book, “Inside and Outside”, published in Iran, which it considered subversive enough to “put the writer in danger of repercussions” — even though the book had been approved in Iran for publication.

The awful florid rhetoric on that page does not ring loud with obvious anti-regime rebellion (“Even if you are a nightingale, remain in the cloth of vultures”) and, according to our translator, could be interpreted in any way at all.

All blame cannot fall on Amnesty, because they do not decide who comes to this country. Manteghi’s protection visa was approved at departmental level, under asylum hard line minister, Philip Ruddock.

An Immigration insider confirmed that anyone seeking Australia’s protection at that time would have automatically been referred by Immigration to ASIO for further investigation.

And, because Manthegi claimed to have information in return for protection, it is likely that Australian Security Intelligence Service, which is concerned with foreign intelligence matters, was also engaged, as were foreign embassies.

Assisting Manteghi’s case was a video that showed him, dressed in the manner of a cleric, or mullah, attending a lecture by Mehdi Karroubi, an influential opposition figure and supposedly politically moderate mullah who would contest and lose presidential elections to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and eventually face arrest.

It must have been tempting to believe that Manteghi had something substantial to offer. Never before had an Iranian mullah defected; and, to this day, apart from the deported Leghaei, never has a senior Iranian-born cleric taken up residence or served a mosque.

The reason is simple: to become a senior cleric in Iran requires the full blessing and approval of Tehran, because they are implicitly part of the regime. That is one of the reasons ASIO could not tolerate the presence of Leghaei, and got rid of him.

In Manteghi’s case, the authorities liked his story, perhaps a little too much; and they liked it more, in 1998, when Tehran claimed it started asking Canberra for Manteghi be deported, because he had committed massive fraud by ripping off clients of a travel agency back in Iran.

The thought processes of Immigration and ASIO cannot yet be known, but an educated guess can be made: as Iran made repeated overtures to hand Manteghi back (refused because there was no extradition treaty with Iran), this may have reinforced suspicions that Manteghi really was a senior spy.

It is standard for Iran to accuse any defector of having committed grand-scale theft or fraud; and it may have crossed minds in ASIO that Iran had invented the fraud story because they were worried Manthegi had run off with their secrets.

Monis had some refugee advocates convinced he was a high-ranking intelligence officer and an ayatollah, ranking him among the most senior of Iran’s clerics.

This is partly disputed by well-connected Afghan-born lawyer Nazir Daawar, whom Manteghi tried to engage in 2009 after he was charged for writing poisonous letters to the families of dead Australian servicemen.

Daawar was so appalled by Manteghi (by then known as Man Haron Monis) that he ended up ordering him from his office in Sydney’s west, refusing to handle his case. But not before Daawar gained good insight to Manteghi.

Daawar rubbishes the claim that Mantheghi was an ayatollah, saying when he arrived in Australia at the age of 32, he was far too young to have achieved such high degree. But he agrees he was a cleric, or mullah.

“There are tens of thousands of clerics in Iran, and he was just one of them,” says Daawar. “His knowledge of Sharia (religious law) was superb. He was a highly educated Shia cleric. But not an ayatollah.”

Daawar, who has worked with hundreds of refugees and has a good relationship with Australian authorities, says they were right to believe Manteghi was a spy, but never the high-level operative that he claimed.

“Monis was in intelligence in Iran,” says Daawar, who since the Martin Place siege has continued to investigate Manteghi through contacts abroad. “But he was not sent here as a spy and his claim he downloaded intelligence was false.”

For Daawar, it’s obvious: if Manteghi really did have valuable information, Iran would have sent someone to Sydney to kill him.

From accounts in Iran, Manteghi was who had humiliated his in-laws ever since he approached Habibolah Mobasheri asking for his daughter’s hand, saying an Islamic prophet appeared to him in a dream instructing him to marry Zahra.

Mobasheri was deputy head of the most famous place of Shia learning in the world, Tehran’s Imam Sadegh University, which Monis attended.

Monis was born in 1964 to a relatively poor farming family in Borujerd. In a place where power is measured not by money but proximity to religious influence, marrying into the Mobasheri family positioned him well.

Zahra “Mahbube” Mobisheri, who had two daughters with Manthegi, told The Weekend Australian that Mantgehi used to beat her and that he was “a traitor to his country and to his family”, who had fled, via Germany, without telling anyone he was leaving.

Zahra claimed she never knew where he worked when they lived together; and disputed he had any clerical standing in Iran. How much of her account, or anything coming out of Iran, can be believed is unclear. Everything passes through the censor’s filter.

But back in 2001, when Manteghi was taking to public places in Sydney ranting that his wife and children were imprisoned as “hostages” of the government of Iran and unable to join him in Australia, Zahra had become president of the women’s Al Zahr University.

Zahra, who specialises in Persian literature, could not have obtained such a position as a hostage. Instead, in Australia, she is viewed as a radical who is part of the regime’s extremist architecture.

She divorced Manteghi in absentia after he abandoned her and the children.

Nazir Daawar says he has been told from sources in Iran that Manteghi was facing sexual charges prior to leaving, but has no evidence — though it is consistent with the behaviour he would come to exhibit in Australia.

After Martin Place, a spokesperson for Imam Sadegh University said Manteghi had been expelled from the university in the 1980s because of an “unusual moral situation”, though did not explain what this meant.

The belief in Iran is that Manteghi could not control his licentiousness and could see his marriage falling apart. He needed a plan.

He had, according to reports out of Iran, been put in charge of a Tehran travel agency, the suspicion being that his role was to monitor and report on those who were trying to leave Iran.

The clients were trying to obtain legal visas to migrate. But they typically lacked English, had no idea how to apply through foreign embassies, or were scared to do so. Travel agencies screwed them out of millions.

Manteghi was accused of ripping off up to 57 people of US$200,000 with a common scam.

As the applicant was told they were close to getting a visa, more money was demanded to finalise the deal. People got in deep and could not back out; they ended up paying US$20,000 or more to the likes of Monis for a single visa.

As his own bad behaviour started catching up with him, Manteghi himself took the chance to flee Iran.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham came forward to lament — or perhaps crow about — Australia’s failure to heed its warnings on Manteghi in the days after Martin place.

“The background and the mental and psychological condition of this individual who sought refuge in Australia two decades ago had been repeatedly discussed with the Australian authorities and his condition was perfectly clear to that country’s officials,” she said.

It is possible that the Iranian regime was, for once, telling it straight: they had wanted this defector and thief back, so they could prosecute him. Which is a euphemism for torturing and hanging him in a public square.

By that stage, even if ASIO had begun to doubt him, he had made such a public spectacle of himself that he genuinely could not be sent home. He had earned Australia’s protection.

According to former student at Imam Sadegh University, senior cleric Hojatleislam Alveiry, who spoke to the zuhor.net website, Manteghi had “without any doubt” an unstable and unpredictable personality.

Alveiry said Manthegi moved between wild enthusiasm and total lack of interest, strict morality and dubious behaviour, squalor and obsessive cleanliness. This would mirror his later shifts from Shia to Sunni to black magic.

“I vividly remember, the summer of 1983 when he served military service in one of Tehran’s military bases,” Alveiry told zuhor.net.

“On two occasions, Haron (Monis) did not attend the morning parade. When the supervisor checked on him he was lying in his bed and writing poetry. Haron said to the officer in charge, who was very angry and surprised, that he was in the mood for writing poems and he did not feel like attending the morning parade.”

Alveiry claimed Monis became “one of the worse husbands and fathers on this planet”, causing heartache and embarrassment to his family.

On January 25, 1998, according to Iranian news sites, the general Shahid Qodusi court issued a bar against him leaving Iran — even though he had already left. This was apparently a formality taken after the travel agency he worked for took legal action against him for robbing its customers.

If accounts are right, he arrived in Australia with a lot of cash to hand. His first years were occupied with winning permanent protection, which he achieved in 2001, and raising awareness about his struggle to reunite with a wife who had apparently already divorced him.

Unable to win the trust of the Iranian community, most likely dismissed as a blowhard by Australian intelligence, Monis’ un-Islamic behaviour became apparent in the early 2000s.

He advertised in small ethnic (non-Islamic) newspapers as a spiritual healer who specialised in fortune telling and black magic exorcisms — practices strictly forbidding by the teachings of the Koran.

Typically, according to a lawyer who was referred a complaint by one of his victims, a woman would come to him complaining that her husband was cheating or that her mother-in-law had cursed her to get her out of her son’s life.

Healing sessions would begin with Mantgehi standing face-to-face with the woman, feeling her all over, then using “water cures” on her naked body. The sessions often ended in intercourse. On two separate occasions in 2014, in the lead-up to Martin Place, he was charged with multiple counts of indecent assault.

His first long-term Australian relationship was with Fijian national Noleen Hayson Pal, who came to him in 2003 asking him to tell her future — a short one that ended in April 2013, with Pal stabbed 18 times and set alight in the stairwell of Manteghi’s apartment.

Pal, who had finally broken from the spell of the vile-tempered Manthegi, had gone to pick up her sons after a custody visit. Monis was charged with being an accessory and the next woman in his life, Amirah Droudis, is in custody facing murder charges.

Monis had few close male friends in Sydney. One was Amin Khademi, an Afghan construction business owner, who with Manteghi set up a company called Australian United Muslim Clerics, registered to Khademi’s Lidcombe home, in 2008.

Prayer meetings run by Monis were held at the house. Ashamed of his connections to Monis, he told workers to pretend he was on holiday in New Zealand when contacted.

“I don’t want to talk about Monis,” he said. “I’m very upset.”

Manteghi was by then going by Sheik Man Haron Monis (“sheik” a religious title; “Man” short for Manteghi; Haron for “Harun al-Rashid”, a caliph from the Islamic Golden Age; and “Monis” the Persian name for Jonah).

NSW police have uncovered nine aliases used by Manteghi/Monis and federal authorities may have found yet another nine. The belief is that he was collecting only one dole cheque but they are now looking into why he hid behind so many identities.

Said a government source: “Obviously the main reason would be to hide who he really is, especially after he received a lot of publicity after being charged with the involvement in the alleged murder of his former wife and a number of allegations of sexual assault.

“In many ways, he was a criminal and didn’t want people to know who he was.”

Another friend who would not be named said he worked for Manteghi in Iran, where he ran a string of black market retail shops.

He said Manteghi once directed him to an address in Tehran to pick up a package of books. He arrived a fortified military facility where guards waved him through security after he mentioned Manteghi’s name.

“He never talked about it but I knew he had connections,” the friend said. “He mentioned to me that he was part of (the intelligence service).”

Granted citizenship, but failing to fit in, Manteghi saw Australia as a playground where he could conduct sexual assaults without being challenged, and to push the concept of free speech to its outmost limits.

In 2009, Monis and Droudis were charged with 12 counts of using the postal service to harass and offend after sending foul and deeply upsetting letters to the parents of Australian servicemen killed in Afghanistan, and to the family of an Austrade official killed in the Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta.

Daawar couldn’t come at representing Monis, not on Monis’ terms. The case, to him, was clear-cut — Monis had to plead guilty. Monis refused. Before booting him from his office, Daawar strongly advised Monis to make a public apology for the letters he called his “flowers of advice”.

“The letters were disgusting,” says Daawar. “I had a personal conflict with this (as an Afghan). People who lost their lives in Afghanistan did so to bring peace and stability. They are heroes in my eyes, not murderers or killers who will burn in hell.”

Other lawyers took up the long-running, so-called free-speech case, which finally ended on December 12, four days before the Sydney siege, when the High Court rejected his last appeal.

That, and the fact he was looking at a long jail term as an accessory to murder, for which he had — extraordinarily — been granted bail, meant he had just enough freedom left to raise hell.

Even in the days before the High Court knocked him back, Monis announced he had joined “Team Islam”, in contempt of Tony Abbott’s Team Australia. From there it was an easy last-minute slide to take up the cause of the Islamic State.

He turned up in the Lindt cafe without even an ISIL flag, proving he was a lousy terrorist. But a terrorist nonetheless.

He always told acquaintances that he was being watched, and that his phones were tapped by ASIO. And, at times, that was true. Abbott said he’d been on ASIO’s watch list in 2008 and 2009, after he sent the letters, but then was deemed a low threat.

“I don’t know why he dropped off the watch list in those days, I really don’t,” Abbott said after barrister Katrina Dawson, 38, a mother of three, and Lindt cafe manager Tori Johnson, 34, were left dead.

Would you like to read more? Follow the chapters below for our exclusive coverage of the killer, his victims, and how Sydney dealt with a tragedy on our doorsteps.