EIGHT men, including one from Blackburn, will appear in court on Wednesday accused of plotting terrorist outrages in Britain and the United States.

After being questioned for two weeks at high security Paddington Green police station in London the group was jointly charged with conspiracy to murder.

They were also charged with planning to use radioactive materials, chemicals, toxic gases or conventional explosives in an attack.

The eight will appear before a district judge at Belmarsh magistrates court, next to the high security Belmarsh jail in south-east London.

Their arrests followed intelligence from Pakistan and sparked fears of an attack at Heathrow, although the airport was not specifically mentioned in the charges.

Dhiren Barot, 32, from Willesden, north west London, was charged under the Terrorism Act with having reconnaissance plans "which could have been used as a blueprint for an attack on financial institutions in the United States."

The plans are alleged to have been for the New York Stock Exchange, Citigroup in New York and the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC. The buildings were among a string of US financial institutions placed on security alert on August 1, two days before Barot and the others were arrested in Britain in raids by the Anti-Terrorist Branch and MI5.

Barot and Nadeem Tarmohammed, 26, also from Willesden, were also charged jointly under the Terrorism Act with having reconnaissance plans of the Prudential Building in New Jersey.

Another man, Quaisar Shaffi, 25, also of Willesden, was charged under the Terrorism Act over possession of an extract from the "Terrorist's Handbook", a bomb-making guide available on the Internet.

Barot, Tarmohammed and Shaffi were jointly charged with plotting to murder and use explosive or toxic devices with five other men - Omar Abdul Rehman, 20, of Bushey, Hertfordshire; Zia Ul Haq, 25, of Paddington, London; Abdul Aziz Jalil, 31, of Luton, Bedfordshire; Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, 24, of Harrow, Middlesex; and Junade Feroze, of Blackburn.