A mother whose five children have been abducted to Libya today described how she tracked them down and recorded their conversations in an attempt to prove who had taken them.

Anita Elgirnazi, 36, asked her eldest daughter to pretend she was writing to a relative as she scrawled in a diary the circumstances surrounding the abduction, Norwich Crown Court heard.

Mrs Elgirnazi said she did not hear from her children for a year after they failed to return home to Norwich on June 10 2000 after spending the day with her former husband, Azzedin Journazi, who is from Libya. They were aged between two and 11 when they were snatched.

She told the court that she eventually managed to make contact with them after acquiring a telephone number for his family.

She arranged a contact visit with the children in January 2002, after getting diplomatic help from Libya.

On the advice of police officers in Norfolk, Mrs Elgirnazi took with her a diary containing a list of carefully worded questions asking how the children got to Libya, the court heard. She gave the diary to her eldest daughter, Rumaysa, with instructions in it to answer the questions by pretending she was writing to a relative.

Mrs Elgirnazi said her former husband was unaware of what was going on as "he thought she was writing a letter to a relative and was watching the television".

The court heard that after her fortnight-long visit she kept in touch with the children by phone and went back to see them in August 2002. This time she took a voice recorder with her to try to establish how and who had taken them out of the United Kingdom, Mrs Elgirnazi said.

On the recording she can be heard asking the children if they had to pretend to be someone else when they left England. One of them replies "yeah".

The prosecution alleges that Mr Journazi devised a plan to take the children illegally from their English mother five years ago. The youngsters, who remain in Libya, had been at the centre of a custody battle.

It is alleged that Mr Journazi recruited seven people to help him spirit Rumaysa Elgirnazi, then 11, Safiya, then nine, Ali, then seven, Hamza, then four, and Aisha then two, out of Dover through France and Spain.

He organised the adbuction in defiance of a court order, the jury was told, after a judge gave the children residence with Ms Elgirnazi, who had separated from their father.

Two of the group, Mustapha Abushima, 38, and his wife, Wedad Ahmed, 45, from Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, deny conspiracy to abduct the children. They are said to have conspired with Mr Journazi, Habib Budeeb, Djamel Beghal, Omar Ben Hamed and Carole Ben Hamed. The five did not appear in court.

Mr Abushima and his wife have eight children of their own and their part of the plot was to pretend to be the parents of the Elgirnazi children and provide passport cover for them while they crossed national boundaries, the prosecution claims.

John Farmer, for the prosecution, said that the defendants had initially claimed to know nothing of the plot and that their defence was that they were part of the expedition but did not realise that the Elgirnazi children were being abducted.

Mr Farmer said that Mr Journazi had picked up the children on the day that he was due to have a lawful access visit. He had pretended that they were going on a normal day out but had then met his co-conspirators and made the journey through France and Spain and across the Mediterranean.

Mr Farmer said that two of the five remaining plotters were in prison in France. The first, David Courtailler, was arrested for unrelated reasons when the group reached Calais. The second, Djamel Beghal, an Algerian, was, he said, "a man of some notoriety" who had travelled on a fake British passport.

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