Islam4UK will be banned from Thursday under anti-terror legislation, making it a criminal offence punishable by up to 10 years in jail to be a member of the group, which also uses other names, said Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

"I have today laid an order which will proscribe Al Muhajiroun, Islam4UK, and a number of the other names the organisation goes by. It is already proscribed under two other names -- Al Ghurabaa and The Saved Sect," he said.

"Proscription is a tough but necessary power to tackle terrorism and is not a course we take lightly. We are clear that an organisation should not be able to circumvent proscription by simply changing its name," he added.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said last week that he was "appalled" by Islam4UK's plans to commemorate the Muslim civilians killed in the conflict with a march through Wootton Bassett in southwest England.

Hundreds of people regularly gather in the town, which is close to the RAF Lyneham airbase where the bodies of British soldiers are returned from Afghanistan, to pay their respects.

Islam4UK said Sunday it was abandoning plans for the march, adding the group had "successfully highlighted the plight of Muslims in Afghanistan" without it taking place.

Its leader Anjem Choudary condemned the banning order.

"The word 'terrorism' has been defined in the dictionary as the use of violence against a community or a section of the community," he told BBC radio, denying that any of his group's members were involved in violence.

"I have been campaigning to say that that is precisely what the British government is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and even domestically," he added.

"Oddly, we are now being targeted as an extremist or terrorist organisation and even banned for merely expressing that. I feel this is a failure of the concept of democracy and freedom."

A total of 108 British service personnel died in Afghanistan last year, the bloodiest for the British military since the 1982 Falklands War. A total of 247 have been killed since operations began in 2001.

The mayor of Wootton Bassett, Steve Bucknell, welcomed the ban.

"I'm very pleased the march was called off in the first instance and I hope that no one else tries to arrange any kind of march or protest, whatever their motivation," he said.

Local MP for Wootton Bassett James Gray added: "Mr Choudary can sound like a clever, cheerful lawyer, modest and sensible, and in a sense that's even more worrying than extremist hate-preachers.

British anti-terror legislation allows groups to be banned which "commit or participate in acts of terrorism, prepare for, promote or encourage terrorism or are otherwise concerned in terrorism".

It was widened in 2006 to include groups which "unlawfully glorify the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism".

But rights group Liberty questioned whether authorities had taken the right decision given extreme groups in Britain were normally allowed to air their views.

"The legal tradition and the political tradition, a very noble one in Britain, is that we only proscribe terrorist organisations, not extreme organisations," director of the group Shami Chakrabarti told BBC television.

"I sincerely hope that the Home Secretary and the Home Office have got some hard evidence to back up this ban," she warned.

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