AL-QAEDA terrorists have targeted 800 Muslim criminals they want to recruit for their “holy war” against Britain, say prison probation officers.

The officers believe that attempts have been made to convert one in 10 of the estimated 8,000 Muslims in the eight high-security prisons in England and Wales to the Al-Qaeda cause in the past two years.

The Ministry of Justice has begun a programme to persuade convicted terrorists to give up their cause. It is also trying to protect vulnerable Muslim inmates from violent extremists.

The ministry said this weekend that it had established a unit to tackle “the risks of extremism and radicalism in prison”.

The radicalisation is being led by some of the estimated 150 terrorist prisoners in England and Wales. The number of Muslim inmates has grown over the past decade to more than 10% of the jail population.

Most are young men, typically petty criminals serving two or three-year sentences for crimes such as burglary, theft, drug dealing or fraud.

Many are impressionable and feel aggrieved by what they see as mistreatment by the authorities. They are considered to be ripe for recruitment by Al-Qaeda.

One of the most notorious Al-Qaeda terrorists, Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” who was convicted of trying to blow up a transatlantic jet in 2001 with explosives in his trainers, had served time as a petty crook before being radicalised.

The size of the problem emerged in evidence given to a review of radicalisation in jails by Nick Herbert, the shadow justice secretary.

Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the probation officers’ union, NAPO, said that proposals to house all terrorist prisoners in one “super-max” prison to keep them away from vulnerable inmates were misplaced.

“That would be very unwise. There is a general view that if the prisoners are concentrated they get more organised. If something went wrong, it could go disastrously wrong, like a mass break-out,” he said.

The Prison Officers Association has called for extremist prisoners to be kept away from inmates who could be vulnerable to radicalisation. It points to an intelligence report claiming that there were specific threats to kidnap and behead an officer at Frankland prison in Co Durham.

An internal review of Whitemoor prison in Cambridgeshire, where almost a third of the 500 inmates are Muslim, warned that staff were struggling to deal with Muslim gangs. It said the staff feared that a serious incident was imminent.

In a report last April Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons, warned that prison officers at high security jails felt that they were “insufficiently trained and supported”.

The prison service has attempted to curb the growth of radical Islam by restricting communal prayers and the reading of the Koran during work breaks.

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