The YouTube page set up by the Plymouth restaurant bomber Nicky Reilly was still online this week after he had pleaded guilty to attempted murder and terror offences. The video-sharing website did not respond to police concerns about Reilly’s Chechen 233 page but removed it last night after The Times questioned why it was still live.

Reilly, 22, who pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey on Wednesday, communicated with extremists in Pakistan via his page. Those contacts indoctrinated him, directed him to terrorist websites and supplied him with bombmaking instructions in the months before he attempted to set off homemade devices in the Giraffe restaurant, Exeter.

Reilly might have killed or maimed lunchtime diners had he not become trapped in a toilet cubicle when the bomb components began to react as he assembled them.

One of the videos bookmarked by Reilly on the favourites section of his page was entitled “How to Make Benzine Bomb”. It was a simplistic instructional video but bore some resemblance to the type of bottle bombs he used in his attempted attack.

Reilly’s YouTube page also included a wide range of videos of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and a video purportedly made by al-Qaeda’s propaganda unit in praise of those atrocities.

His other highlighted videos included an ambush of a US military convoy in Iraq, material from Somalia and from the Beslan school siege in Russia.

On his profile, Reilly gave his name as Rashid. A convert to Islam, he appeared in court under the name Mohamad Abdulaziz Rashid Saeed Alim.

A YouTube spokesman said rules “prohibit content like pornography, gratuitous violence or instructional bomb-making videos”. He added: “When people see content that they think is inappropriate they can flag it and our staff then review it.”

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