A ROW over a Southampton mosque which has caused bitter divisions in the city’s Muslim community is to return to the courts.

The city council wants a judge to rule on who owns the still incomplete Medina Mosque, pictured above right, more than ten years after the first brick was laid on land the authority agreed to sell at a huge discount.

The original trustees to that agreement, who masterminded the purpose-built, £2m mosque, have been unable to settle the ownership question after they fell out with one another.

The dispute, which has seen a mass brawl at the mosque, has already cost thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ and trustees’ money.

A previous legal action was launched by the council in 2003 to get the High Court to decide which of the different factions of the Muslim community had rightful claim to the building’s freehold.

The mosque first opened in 2000. It has been run as a place of worship and a community centre since 2002 by Southampton Medina Mosque Trust Ltd, founded by one of the three trustees who signed the building agreement with the council.

General secretary Rashid Brora said: “We are not interested in it for ourselves. We just want to put the land ownership into the name of the entity that can carry the mosque forward.”

He said the mosque’s ruling committee was open and democratic and the mosque would continue to be open to all during the proceedings.

The trustees of a separate organisation, the Southamp-ton Medina Mosque Trust, are also claiming ownership.

Chairman Mohammed Aslam, who was also one of signatories to the building agreement, said that his unincorporated charity was the original body that ran the mosque. “They [the limited company] weren’t even around when the building agreement was signed with the city council,” he said.

The council said it wants a declaration as to which of the two organisitions should benefit from the transfer of the land once the terms of the building agreement are met.

A final hearing is expected in the autumn.