During legal argument heard in the absence of the jury, Dorian Lovell-Park QC, defending Boufassil, claimed his client had been "pumped and dumped" by MI5 agents.

Boufassil claimed he told the Security Service everything he knew about Abrini but was then "thrown to the wolves" when he ceased to be of any use to them.

His barrister said: "In his eyes, he found himself cooperating with the security services - reluctantly to begin with, but then more freely.

"He feels he may have ceased to have been of any use to them, and he was effectively thrown to the wolves. Which is, in fact, what happens."

Boufassil, who had smoked cannabis since the age of 15, denied being a terrorist sympathiser, insisting he viewed Isil as "worse than animals".

He said as a Sufi Muslim he was against terrorism and believed in "universal love and peace".

But the jury heard how he used at least three separate phones with 22 different SIM cards to contact members of his terror cell.

Karen Robinson, prosecuting, said she could neither "confirm nor deny" the claims about MI5, and the judge ruled them inadmissible and stopped them being used as evidence in his defence.