A court has heard a transcript of a Muslim gang in Birmingham planning to kidnap a British Muslim soldier and behead him. According to the transcript, translated from a Pakistani dialect and based on covert recording of Parviz Khan, an unemployed teaching assistant, tells Amjad Mahmood in Birmingham on December 29, 2006:
"Could you get that other job done?" he said, referring to the kidnap plan, "You know what, I have found the people who have said OK."
Khan - who pleaded guilty to charges relating to the planned kidnap and murder last month - told Mahmood that he planned to lure the soldier into a car in Broad Street in Birmingham by offering him drugs:
"If we can do it via the other person’s lad, by having a chit-chat with him and also by winning his interest by the white stuff. Then afterwards we can ambush him or whatever.
"If you give him the address, two lads will show blades and get him in the car and take him.
"If the other way, then just tell us where he lives. We will sort it. The car will be parked and as he comes out we will say, ’Oh! you been causing trouble’.
"Drag him into the car — there will be three men, they will put him in the car. I said it’s not going to take more than 30 seconds — it’s not as if we are going to kill people there."
Once they had kidnapped the soldier, the gang planned to behead him, record the murder on video and then distribute it in order to cause panic. Khan was recorded bragging that Tony Blair, the then-Prime Minister, would "go crazy".
When police searched a house belonging to Zahoor Iqbal, another Birmingham man accused of taking part in the plot, they found a bag containing a CD containing electronic copies of 'Encyclopaedia Jihad', a key al-Qaeda training manual, as well as a US army field manual, a book listing the fatal dosage of poisons, and information about detonations and primers, car bombs, and improvised explosive devices, the court was told.