The Maktabah bookshop, notorious for stocking incendiary works offering romantic notions of jihad, is a regular target for police raids.

The store was co-founded by Moazzem Begg, one of the Britons freed from the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, and Imran Khan, an enterprising Muslim journalist. It has since changed premises and names and passed through several hands. In spite of numerous searches and arrests, nobody from the business has been charged with an offence.

One neighbouring businessman said yesterday: “We are always seeing MI5 types around here. You can spot them easily.”

Police swooped early, cutting through thick security shutters to reach the front foor of the shop and smash it down. They stripped shelves and left with computers, books and leaflets.

In the window the titles Muslim Heroes of the World, Heroes of Islam and Indian Genocide were displayed along with posters calling for the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation. Display cases stacked with veils, incense sticks, huge jars of perfume and an array of ceremonial candles lined the shop floor, stretching 40ft back to a rear office.

The shop is sandwiched between a beauty salon and the Bank House pub, both closed yesterday. It is rented for £1,100 a month from Nanji Gohel, who owns the premises and three flats above. Mr Gohel, 64, said that the business had been there four years; the initial three-year rental period was renewed last March. “He always paid his rent on time and I would only see him if there was a problem,” the bemused landlord said of the shopkeeper.

The Times visited Maktabah shortly after the London bomb-ings of July 7, 2005, to investigate inflammatory literature sold by Islamic stores.

One book, The Army of Madi-nah in Kashmir, a British Muja-hid’s memoirs of guerrilla warfare in the disputed Indian territory, seemed especially dangerous to impressionable minds. “Terror works,” Esa al-Hindi, the author, wrote, “and that is why the believers are commanded to enforce it by Allah.”

That writer’s real name was Dhiren Barot. He was sent by al-Qaeda to check potential economic and Jewish targets in New York just before the twin towers were destroyed. He was imprisoned in England for 40 years after admitting plotting terrorism. The bookshop not only sold the autobiography; under Mr Khan’s leadership it had commissioned the work.

The Times also bought a DVD, 21st Century CrUSAders, which showed images of Tony Blair’s face morphing into Satan’s, and Jews at prayer with the subtitle “Brothers of pigs and monkeys”. Another passage introduced Mr Begg.

The Maktabah shop owner at the time, who declined to be identified, said: “We have a duty to sell books that express a variety of viewpoints.” 21st Century CrUSAders was still being heavily promoted on the Maktabah website yesterday, at £9.95. “None will view this and not be stirred by emotion,” the blurb said. Similarly, the al-Hindi memoir continued to be on sale for £4.95.

The bookshop was first raided in 2000 by 60 anti-terrorist officers who seized books, files and computers from its former premises in Ladypool Road, Sparkbrook.

Mr Begg later left to set up a school in Taleban-controlled Afghanistan. He was detained in Pakistan in 2002 and kept in custody by the coalition for three years before being released from Cuba without charge.

Mr Khan moved the business across Birmingham’s “balti triangle” to a new location in Stratford Road in the inner-city district of Sparkhill. A few hundred yards away he opened Blade Communications, an internet café and mobile phone and computer store, attracting youths from the largely Kash-miri community.

By 2003, Mr Khan had moved to Pakistan. The bookshop and café were raided in another counter-terrorism operation. The café was again being searched yesterday.

A mile away, Dar Makkah International bookshop, near Birmingham Central Mosque, was sealed off for investigation.

A neighbouring shopkeeper who knows the proprietors said: “They are a very straight couple in their forties. I saw nothing at all suspicious, and in this day and age you have to be vigilant.”

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