A Birmingham care worker arrested for being an illegal immigrant had an “arsenal” of information which could have been helpful to terrorists.

One of the items seized was a video recording that Pa Jobe had taken on a mobile phone of West Midlands Police headquarters.

Jailing Jobe for three years and nine months, Judge Melbourne Inman QC said he was satisfied by the time he was arrested he had become a radical Islamist and said that people had to be deterred from accessing the kind of material he had downloaded from the internet. Jobe, 29, pleaded guilty to four charges of possessing a document or recording containing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

Mark Heywood, prosecuting at Birmingham Crown Court, said: “The Crown’s case is that the defendant at the time of arrest in December 2006 was in possession of what amounted to an arsenal of information of a radical Islamist nature some of which crosses the line of criminal law.”

Lawrence McNulty said Jobe had come to the UK hoping to earn enough money and obtain enough skills in order to return to the US from where he had been deported. He said the video he had taken of the police headquarters would only have been of limited assistance to a terrorist.