Would-be bomber, Saajid Badat, used sacrifice72 as his e-mail name

A British prisoner who plotted to blow a US passenger plane out of the sky was so determined to die for al-Qaeda that he used the e-mail address [email protected], he admitted in court.

Saajid Badat, 35, told the New York trial of British hate preacher Abu Hamza that he used the Yahoo account while researching Jewish targets in South Africa.

The word sacrifice was a nod to his determination to die in the cause of violent jihad and 72 was a reference to the number of virgins that al-Qaeda preached a "martyr" is entitled to deflower in heaven.

Badat said he went to Pakistan in mid-2001 to use the internet to research Jewish targets, which included a Holocaust museum, synagogues and the diamond industry.

Under cross-examination on Tuesday from Hamza's lawyer Jeremy Schneider, he said he spent two days preparing a "detailed" report for al-Qaeda bosses on the targets.

He admitted he was willing to see women and children killed should the attacks have gone ahead.

When al-Qaeda asked him instead to blow a US jet out of the sky and murder hundreds of people in late 2001, he confessed that he felt "honoured" and "proud".

Badat flew back to Britain from Pakistan, via the Netherlands and Turkey, with a shoe bomb strapped to his foot but backed out of the plot in December 2001.

Badat testified by video link from Britain because he faces 30 years to life imprisonment in the United States over the shoe bomb plot.

Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, 56, better known in Britain as Abu Hamza al-Masri, has pleaded not guilty to 11 kidnapping and terror charges which pre-date the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

He faces spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security US prison if convicted in the Manhattan federal court after a trial expected to last well into this month.

Hamza is blind in one eye and had both arms blown off in an explosion in Afghanistan years ago.