A schoolboy who left his parents a farewell letter telling them that he was going to fight as a soldier of Islam and would meet them again in the “garden of paradise” was jailed yesterday for two years.

Mohammed Irfan Raja ran away from his home in Ilford, East London, in February last year hoping to join four Bradford University students determined to train as terrorists in Pakistan to fight British soldiers and die as martyrs.

Raja, who was then 17, urged his parents in the letter not to blame each other for failing to stop him but his resolve was weakened by a tearful telephone conversation in which his parents begged him to come home. He was arrested on his return after three days away and the rest of the members in the would-be terrorist cell were rounded up.

Yesterday he was ordered at the Old Bailey to serve two years in a young offender institution.

Four others – Aitzaz Zafar, 20, Usman Malik, 21, Akbar Butt, 20, and Awaab Iqbal, also 20, who had amassed a small library glorifying Islamic terrorism to persuade others to fight the holy war – were sentenced to serve between twenty-seven months and three years. All had been found guilty this week of possessing articles that could be used for terrorism.

Judge Peter Beaumont, the Recorder of London, said that they should be punished for being prepared to train in Pakistan and then fight in Afghanistan against British soldiers.

He told them: “Each of you is British. You were born here, your families live here, you went to school and university here. You hold British passports. You live under the protection of its laws, which give you freedom of speech and religious observance. Yet each of you was prepared to break its laws. Why? Because in my judgment you were intoxicated by the extremist nature of the material that each of you collected, shared and discussed – the songs, the images and language of violent jihad.

“So carried away by that material were you that each of you crossed the line. That is exactly what the people that peddle this material want to achieve and exactly what you did.”

Iqbal, Zafar and Malik had been at the centre of a radical Islamic group at Bradford University. Police later found downloaded material said to be intended to encourage terrorism or martyrdom. Iqbal superimposed his own face and that of his friends on a poster of the nineteen hijackers behind the September 11 attacks and the four watched jihadi videos together.

Raja, now 19, had been introduced to the group by another 17-year-old student.

Andrew Edis, QC, for the prosecution, said: “Irfan Raja was not as firm in his purpose as he hoped he would be, and as the people in Bradford hoped he would be. He had hidden his purpose from his family, who were beside themselves with worry and fear when they found out what he had done. They are orthodox Muslims and do not subscribe to this extremist or radical strain of thought.”

Mr Edis said that much of the propaganda venerated suicide as a weapon of war. They were the same views put forward by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, representing a call to arms to young men to give their lives to rid Muslim lands of “unbelievers”.

The material included a US military guide to terrorism that gave instructions on how to make explosive devices and a suicide-bombing manual.

Malik had chat-room conversations with a cousin who was later arrested in Syria as a suspected terrorist. The cousin told him to have a cover story, such as attendance at a family wedding, when going to Pakistan to train.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of the Scotland Yard Counter Terrorism Command, said: “This was not an adolescent fantasy. These five young men had decided to become active jihadists and to seek training at camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. It is clear that these men were intent on committing terrorism overseas. The extremist material they all possessed was designed to assist them in that purpose, but their efforts were frustrated by police action at an early stage.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• How I lost the gift of joy for a while
• Why Ann Widdecombe has got it wrong
• Alas, it’s the end of the road for petrolheads