THE party of youths pulled on their blue overalls, snapped shut their visors and, taking aim with their paintball guns, prepared for four hours of licensed mayhem.

But the men who pursued each other last Sunday morning through the wooded grounds of Delta Force’s paintballing park near Congleton, Cheshire, had little in common with the stag parties and company teams nearby.

Instead of listening to corporate pep talks between sessions, the young Asian men were instructed by an imam dressed in fatigues on the need to unite Muslims worldwide in an international empire.

One senior member of the group, who is a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT), which Tony Blair has proposed should be banned, insisted that devout Muslims should refuse to vote in British elections.

HT, a group that preaches against the existence of Israel, has been described as a “conveyor belt to terrorism” by critics even within the Muslim community, though it says it eschews violence. It is banned in several Arab countries, and banned by the National Union of Students from British university campuses.

The day before, in an unrelated operation, police had raided a Muslim school, set in woodland near Crowborough, East Sussex, in an investigation into alleged terrorist training camps in Britain.

There have also been fears that terrorist training camps were being held in the Lake District and north Wales, and the terrorists Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer went on a whitewater rafting “bonding” trip in Wales before the London bombings of July 2005.

Undercover Sunday Times reporters were present last Sunday to witness first-hand the early stages of the radicalisation of young Asians by Islamic militants.

The reporters watched 10 youths, in their late teens or early twenties, arrive and were invited to join the session. During a lull in the game, they were approached by an imam, Ahsraf Bader, 34, who was with the group.

Bader, wearing a fleece jacket and jeans, described Osama Bin Laden as a “Muslim brother” and said it was the “responsibility” of every Muslim to bring back the caliphate, or a pan-Islamic government.

Kasim Shafiq, a senior member of the group and who said that he was a member of HT, declared that Muslims should not vote in British elections. “Our own shahadah [creed] tells us that the authority and law do not belong to the non-Muslims, so why are we going to vote for non-Muslims?” he said.

Shafiq, 27, an IT specialist, added: “If you think that you can win power, if you look at the logistics of how this country works . . . you’ve got to change the [minds and opinions of the] whole of the cabinet towards Islam, you’ve got to change the whole of the army towards Islam, then you will gain power.”

The group organising the paintballing activity, the Cheetham Hill Youth Forum, states it is a community body that works on social problems in the inner-city district of Manchester.

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