An Islamist fanatic who plotted to kidnap and behead a British Muslim solider was grooming his three-year-old daughter to marry a jihadi terrorist, a court was told yesterday.
Speaking to a friend at his home, which had been bugged by the security services, Parviz Khan is said to have predicted that the child would one day live with the Mujahidin near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
“Inshallah [God willing], she’ll marry into them and give birth to them,” he told Zahoor Iqbal, a long-time friend. A jury at Leicester Crown Court was told that Khan then called his daughter towards him and asked her: “What will you cook for the men in the mountains?”
Khan, 37, has admitted planning to murder a British Muslim soldier who was to be lured to a car in Birmingham city centre, then driven to a lockup garage. Video footage would have been released of him being beheaded “like a pig”. Khan, who is married with three children, has also pleaded guilty to sending equipment to Pakistan for terrorists fighting British and American troops in Afghanistan.
Mr Iqbal, 30, an attendance and monitoring officer at a Birmingham school, denies aiding Khan in supplying equipment for terrorism. He has also pleaded not guilty to possessing a jihadist computer disc.
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Transcripts of conversations between Khan and Mr Iqbal that were secretly recorded at Khan’s home, in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham, were read to the court yesterday.
Nigel Rumfitt, QC, for the prosecution, said they showed that Khan “wants his daughter to marry a Mujahidin terrorist . . . that is what he was training her to want. That is about as sick as it gets a three-year-old girl being asked what she wants to cook for a Mujahidin in the mountains.”
The court has been told that Khan sent four large shipments of items to Pakistan over two years, including night-vision apparatus, “snipers’ gloves and equipment to detect cameras and electronic bugs”.
Mr Iqbal has told the jury that he thought his trips with Khan to wholesalers in the Birmingham area were to buy relief aid for victims of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.
“All I saw were fleeces and thermals. I never saw any radar detectors or night-vision equipment,” he said. Questioned about the bugged conversations he had with Khan, he said he thought that his friend was not being serious when he talked about terrorism. “I just understood him to be waffling on, fantasising, that sort of thing,” he said.
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Khan had not been talking about his daughter marrying a Mujahid, said Mr Iqbal, who claimed that his friend had meant that he wanted her to marry an Afghan mountain villager.
The court has heard that a computer disc called Encyclopaedia Jihad was found by police in a bag at Mr Iqbal’s house in Birmingham after raids in January last year. Mr Iqbal says that he did not know what was inside the bag, which belonged to Khan.
Alongside Mr Iqbal in the dock is Amjad Mahmood, 32, a shopkeeper, who denies supplying equipment for terrorism and failing to disclose information about the kidnap plot. Three Birmingham men have admitted offences linked to Khan’s activities, including Basiru Gassama, 30, a Gambian who pleaded guilty to failing to disclose information about the kidnap plot. Hamid Elasmar, 44, and Mohammed Irfan, 31, have admitted supplying equipment for terrorism.
Mr Iqbal’s wife, Rohama Sattar, told the court about her “at times impossible” marriage, adding that her husband was torn between his love for his mother and his wife. Jurors also heard that Mrs Sattar wrote a letter to her husband in 2000 in which she referred to his “jihad obligation”. She told the court that she thought of this in terms of a “personal struggle”.
Former colleagues of Mr Iqbal, who worked as an achievement mentor at Saltley School, described him as a moderate Muslim who was popular with pupils and staff. Anne Cole, the head teacher, said she was shocked at his arrest. Ann Burton, the assistant head, added: “I found him to be a caring, kind person who worked hard for the children.”
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The trial continues.