Angela Gordon met her co-killer Junaid Abuhamza after her husband, Khyra’s biological dad, had married a second wife.

Ishaq Abuzaire said he married Gordon in 1995 after meeting her just three days earlier at their local mosque.

He said that Gordon had accepted he would marry another after he converted to Islam to escape from a life of crime.

He said they were happy for years and that people were even ‘envious’ of their relationship.

And he claimed it was Abuhamza who caused Gordon to turn against him while he was visiting his second wife’s parents in Spain in 2003.

He said: “I went to Spain in 2003 to visit Carolina’s parents and I phoned Angela to see how things were and it was like I was talking to a different person.

“She told me that as far as she was concerned we were now divorced, that she had been given advice by someone in the community and they had told her what I was doing was wrong.

“When I got back to UK I went round to see her as soon as I could. Her behaviour had changed completely, she was not the person I used to know and was aggressive, violent and shaking.

“I couldn’t understand what had happened to her but all she would tell me was that she had been given advice that we should divorce because I was not good for her anymore.

“A few days later I went to pick her up from the doctor’s surgery with our son and I saw her leaving with Junaid.

“I was very upset to see her with him and knew immediately he was the mysterious person who had been giving her advice.

“I confronted them but Junaid was very arrogant and refuse to speak to me properly.

“I tried to explain to her that if she was upset there were proper channels and processes within the community that she should have gone through, not taken the advice of this guy who everyone in the community had warned her against. Of course no one had a rope around her neck, telling her what to do – she was her own woman.”

Gordon’s plea of manslaughter was accepted in the sixth week of a retrial after she admitted five counts of child cruelty.

Psychiatrists agreed that she was suffering from severe depression when Khyra died.