Police record: was jailed in the 1980's for sexual assault, released at age 20.
He was arrested in 1992 and spent seven years in a Jordanian prison for conspiring to overthrow the monarchy and establish an Islamic caliphate after the Jordanian authorities discovered assault rifles and bombs stashed in his house. In March 1999, Mr. Zarqawi was released under an amnesty for political prisoners.
Sometime in 2001, Zarqawi was arrested again in Jordan but was soon released. He was sentenced to death in absentia for the killing of Laurance Foley. In Oct 2002 Al-Zarqawi paid three men to kill Laurence Foley, a senior American diplomat, outside his home in Amman.
Later, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death for plotting the attack on the Radisson SAS Hotel.

Known History
Traveled to Afghanistan in 1989 to fight the Soviets but the war by then was over. Became a writer for a magazine called small jihadist magazine, Al Bonian al Marsous, whose name means "The Strong Wall.'' He was 22, with a medium build and shiny black eyes, and roamed the countryside interviewing Arab fighters about the glorious battles he had missed.
Mr. Zarqawi returned to Zarqa in 1992 and fell in with a militant Islamic group, Bayaat al Imam, or Loyalty to the Imam. He was arrested in 1993 after the Jordanian authorities discovered assault rifles and bombs stashed in his house. He was in jail from 93-99.

There are reports that in the early-1990s, Zarqawi travelled to Europe and started the al-Tawhid militant organization, a group dedicated to killing Jews and installing an Islamic regime in Jordan.

Fellow inmates said that around that time, 1998, just as Al Qaeda was emerging as a serious threat blamed for the two bombings of United States Embassies in Africa, Mr. Zarqawi started talking about killing Americans.

In June 2000, Mr. Zarqawi went to Peshawar, Pakistan, at the Afghan border. He crossed into Afghanistan, alone. His mother died of leukemia in February of this year at age 62. Her last wish was for her son to be killed in battle, not captured.
In early 2000, Zarqawi opened a weapons camp connected to Al Qaeda in late 2000 in western Afghanistan
American intelligence officials said Mr. Zarqawi opened a weapons camp connected to Al Qaeda in late 2000 in western Afghanistan.

Intelligence officials say he then left Afghanistan, where he had taken a second wife, and made his way to a corner of northern Iraq controlled by a Kurdish separatist Islamic group called Ansar al-Islam.

United States officials said he was wounded in a missile strike after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks when American forces went after the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The next sighting of Mr. Zarqawi was on Sept. 9, 2002, when Jordanian agents said he illegally entered Jordan from Syria.
A month later Laurence Foley, a senior American diplomat, was fatally shot outside his home in Amman. Jordanian agents arrested three men who, the agents said, told them that they had been recruited, armed and paid by Mr. Zarqawi. He was sentenced to death in absentia.

In 2002 had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide. The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.

Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it.

In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.

In 2003 six people arrested in London ricin from this camp. Plotted to use ricin in attacks across Europe. In August a car bomb blew up the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the first in a deadly wave of bombings.

An intercepted letter released by the Americans in February 2004 seems to support their claim that targeting Shias is central to Zarqawi's strategy in Iraq.

Jordan accuses Zarqawi of plotting to release a chemical cloud in Amman. Men were arrested in Amman who purportedly were planning to release the chemical attack. He was convicted in absentia on March 20, 2005, and sentenced to 15 years in prison in addition to his two death sentences for earlier crimes in Jordan.

Al-Zarqawi was killed in June 2006 when US planes dropped two 500 lb bombs on his safe house.

Al-Zarqawi isn't the only jihadist leader independent of Bin Laden. In the 1990s, myriad jihadist groups in Afghanistan had their own training camps and agendas, from Uzbeks to Chechens to Pakistani fighters for Kashmir. Bin Laden and his cadre of loyalists were the most dangerous. But other, local groups have also targeted the West. Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah bombed the night club in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2002, and a Moroccan cell is suspected of having masterminded the Madrid, Spain, attack in March of this year