This almost looks like Bsomething Michael Palin and Eric Idle would write and work on:

The BBC funded a paintballing trip for men later accused of Islamic terrorism and failed to pass on information about the 21/7 bombers to police, a court was told yesterday.

Mohammed Hamid, who is charged with overseeing a two-year radicalisation programme to prepare London-based Muslim youths for jihad, was described as a “cockney comic” by a BBC producer.

The BBC paid for Mr Hamid and fellow defendants Muhammad al-Figari and Mousa Brown to go on a paintballing trip at the Delta Force centre in Tonbridge, Kent, in February 2005. The men, accused of terrorism training, were filmed for a BBC programme called Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, screened in June 2005.

This is the latest in a long string of such media gaffes:

• In 1916, a New York Times reporter took a still-exiled Vladimir Lenin to a “Binge and Purge” club in Geneva, Switzerland.
• During a 1921 tour, a Village Voice editor paid a $360 bar tab at “Putch’s Bar and Grill” for a young Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.
• In 1997, an unnamed Star/Tribune reporter took a vacationing Mohammad Atta to the Minnesota State Fair, giving him $2000 (which was apparently spent entirely at the bumper cars).

I digress:

It was alleged that Mr Hamid told a BBC reporter that he would use the corporation’s money to pay a fine imposed by magistrates for a public order offence.

Thoughtful of them.