A LONG-running row over the ownership of a purpose-built £2m Southampton mosque was due to return to the High Court today.

Southampton City Council wants a judge to rule on who owns the Medina Mosque – still incomplete more than ten years after the first brick was laid.

The original trustees of a 1997 building agreement, under which the council sold the plot in St Mary’s Road for £56,000, around a quarter of its market value, have since fallen out with one another.

The council wants a declaration on which of two rival factions of the Muslim community should get the building’s freehold.

One includes the trustees of the Southampton Medina Mosque Trust, headed by Mohammed Aslam, one of the three signatories to the building agreement. The other is the Southampton Medina Mosque Trust Ltd which has been running the mosque as a place of worship and a community centre since 2002.

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

A ruling on ownership will also allow the council to settle outstanding planning breaches relating to car parking and a temporary “community hut” at the mosque.

However, it could also give rise to further legal action over the thorny issue of who paid what in donations and loans to build the mosque.

A previous legal action was launched by the council in 2003. This was put on hold for the Charity Commission to try to sort out the dispute but it failed to reach an agreement between the parties.