Testifying in John Allen Muhammad's murder trial, his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, spoke of Muhammad's plan to use a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, the boot of which he had modified into a "sniper's nest", as a shooting platform to kill six people a day for a month.

He said that Muhammad decided which of them would fire from a hole cut into the aging Caprice's boot, a tactic that he said was drawn from "an Irish Republican Army training manual".

After a test run that involved shooting two women . . . one fatally . . . outside a liquor store in Alabama, Muhammad said it was time "to begin the terror".

Malvo, who is now 21 but was only 17 at the time of the shootings, outlined the meticulous planning behind the killings. He said Muhammad wanted to "terrorise" Washington DC and quoted him saying: "The chickens come home to roost".

Muhammad, 45, represented himself in the murder trail in the Washington suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland . . . where six of the 10 killings took place. He was sentenced to six life terms with no possibility of parole.

Both men have already been convicted of a sniper murder each in Virginia.

Muhammad received the death penalty in that state, while Malvo received a life prison term.