Four admit plan to murder soldier

Parviz Khan then wanted to send footage of the atrocity to a television station to instil "fear and panic" into Britain's Armed Forces, Leicester Crown Court heard.

Khan, a father-of-three from Alum Rock, Birmingham, pleaded guilty on January 17 to engaging in conduct with the intention to kidnap and kill the soldier. His plea was revealed to a jury trying two other men on charges under the Terrorism Act, including a defendant accused of withholding information about the plot.

Nigel Rumfitt QC, prosecuting, told the jury that Khan hoped to kidnap a British Muslim soldier in Birmingham's Broad Street entertainment quarter with the help of drug dealers. Mr Rumfitt told the court: "He would be taken to a lock-up garage and there he would be murdered by having his head cut off like a pig. This atrocity would be filmed... and the film released to cause panic and fear within the British Armed Forces and the wider public."

Mr Rumfitt also told the jury that Khan, of Foxton Road, Alum Rock, was at the centre of a terrorist "cell" or network based in the Birmingham area. Khan was active in gathering items, Mr Rumfitt said, including computer hard drives, range-finders and night vision equipment to be sent out to Pakistan for use by terrorists operating near the Afghan border

Mr Rumfitt added: "The prosecution say that Parviz Khan is a fanatic. He was enraged by the idea that there were Muslim soldiers in the British Army, some of them Muslims from The Gambia in West Africa."

The jury was also told that Khan wanted another man, Gambian national Basiru Gassama, to help identify the victim of the soldier plot. Gassama, a 30-year-old of Radstock Avenue, Hodge Hill, Birmingham, has pleaded guilty to failing to inform the authorities of the plan to kill a soldier. In fact, the court heard, Gassama never came up with the details of an individual target for Khan, and the plan "lay dormant" from July 2006 to November of that year.

After Mr Rumfitt opened the case, junior prosecution counsel Duncan Atkinson read a series of agreed facts to the jury. Mr Atkinson, who also detailed the guilty pleas entered by a total of four defendants, said that on July 29 2006, Khan told Gassama "we don't need to go to Afghanistan. We're gonna die anyway."

Khan then talked about setting up a drug deal, tying someone up and then getting a "DVD movie camera" out to prepare a statement to be released to television station Al-Jazeera. "It would terrorise British soldiers and Khan said: 'Young Blair is gonna go crazy'," Mr Atkinson said.

The jury was told that two other men from Birmingham, Mohammed Irfan, 31, and Hamid Elasmar, 44, have also pleaded guilty to charges related to the cell's activities, but two other defendants are standing trial. Amjad Mahmood, 32, of Jackson Road, Alum Rock, Birmingham, denies knowing about the soldier plot between April 2006 and February 2007, but failing to disclose it to the authorities. Zahoor Iqbal, 30, of Elmbridge Road, Perry Barr, Birmingham, has pleaded not guilty to possessing a document or record likely to be useful to a terrorist, namely a computer disc called Encyclopaedia Jihad.