BNP leader 'caught on film warning of the evil of Islam'

The British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, told supporters that Islam was a "wicked, vicious faith" that was turning the country into "a multiracial hell-hole", a court has heard.

The BNP chairman urged a crowd in Keighley, West Yorkshire - secretly recorded by the BBC - to vote BNP to ensure "the British people really realise the evil of what these people have done to our country", the court was told.

Mr Griffin, 47, and a fellow party activist, Mark Collett, 26, face a series of charges, including incitement to racial hatred, arising out of speeches filmed by a BBC journalist, Jason Gwynne, who posed as a BNP supporter, for a documentary on the party.

Mr Griffin, from mid-Wales, and Mr Collett, from Leicestershire, were charged in April 2005 after the BBC screened its documentary, The Secret Agent, in July 2004. The jury trying the men at Leeds Crown Court was told that they both addressed a crowd at the Reservoir Tavern, in Keighley, on 19 January 2004. Reading excerpts from the speeches, Rodney Jameson QC, for the prosecution, told the court that Mr Griffin said: "This wicked, vicious faith has expanded from a handful of cranky lunatics about 1,300 years ago, to its now sweeping country after country before it, all over the world." Mr Collett addressed the same gathering, and said: "Let's show these ethnics the door in 2004." Mr Jameson said Mr Collett's speeches were "little more than crude, racist rants".

The trial was adjourned until Monday.