A white supremacist who amassed a terrifying haul of arms and bomb-making equipment was planning to start a race war, detectives revealed today.

David Tovey, 37, was found guilty this afternoon of two charges of racially aggravated criminal damage.

But what the jury at Oxford Crown Court had not been told was that he earlier pleaded guilty to three explosives and six weapons charges.

One detective described him as a cross between Hungerford killer Michael Ryan and David Copeland, the Soho nail-bomber.

The bodybuilding fanatic was waiting for "some kind of trigger" to start a massacre and his hoard of munitions was more devastating than a terrorist's, according to police.

Pony-tailed Tovey was found guilty of the criminal damage charges by the jury after just an hour-and-a-half.

Only afterwards could details of his arsenal be revealed.

Tovey was caught when police investigating a campaign of racist graffiti in public toilets raided his house in Carterton, Oxfordshire.

Neighbours were evacuated from their houses after officers found pipe bombs, a Second World War Sten sub-machinegun, two shotguns, a silenced pistol and dum-dum bullets at the house.

Former Army Military Policeman Detective Sergeant Phil Murphy said he was shocked when he saw the guns stored there.

"It blew my mind. Because of my background, I knew exactly what I was looking at - which was what made it so frightening."

Another detective said: "He was a cross between Michael Ryan and Hungerford and David Copeland, the Soho nail-bomber".

Tovey, who wore the same striped shirt and red tie throughout the trial, showed no emotion as the verdicts were read out.

He admitted possessing a prohibited Sten gun, a pistol, a SPAZ pump action shotgun, a shortened Kestrel shotgun, a night-stick adapted to fire one shotgun round and 12 rounds of 9mm ammunition.

He also admitted two counts of having explosives and he confessed to one charge of making a napalm-type explosive.

The court heard that Tovey scrawled anti-white graffiti in public toilets in Witney, Oxfordshire, between August and November last year in a bid to stir up hatred against ethnic minorities.

He allegedly left messages including "All whites are s ," "Black Powa", "Die white trade centre scum" and "4,000 plus white pigs died (a good start)".

In January this year he was caught on CCTV going into the toilet of a Shell petrol station in Stratford-upon-Avon where more racist slogans were daubed.

Prosecution lawyer Simon Mayo told the jury: "It would not have escaped your attention that looking at the defendant in the dock, he is quite obviously a white European male himself.

"The prosecution say the defendant's intention was to stir up in the white European population in this country a groundswell of hostile reaction to that graffiti campaign and therefore to excite racial tension."

It was to investigate the graffiti that officers called at Tovey's house on Valentine's Day this year - and they were stunned to stumble across the "mind-blowing" weapons cache.

During the search they found lists of registration numbers belonging to black and Asian drivers that Tovey had been following home, writing "black bastard" and "paki" next to some entries.

He had also been staking out a mosque in Swindon, Wiltshire.

Detectives then found a letter and a magazine addressed to Tovey from the British National Party (BNP).

Computer checks revealed he had been been using white supremacist and US survivalist websites.

But Tovey's stunned wife and his past and present girlfriends all told the court they did not have the slightest idea he was racist.

He married Oi Yi Yip, who is of Hong Kong Chinese origin, in 1989 after they met at an Oxford hospital. They ran a Chinese takeaway in Birmingham together, which later went bust.

She told the court they were still man and wife although they had not lived together since they were both involved in a serious car crash on New Year's Day 1995, in which she suffered a fractured skull and his knee was shattered.

She said she had no idea he had a number of girlfriends going at the same time, including a woman from Johannesburg in South Africa, a woman from central Africa and a nurse in Witney.

"What David is being accused of is a total shock. Being married to him for this length of time I never heard him uttering a single word that would make me think he was racist," she said.

Former girlfriend Bernice Tyrell, who is black, said she had never known he was married despite going out with him intermittently for 15 or 16 years.

She said he had never expressed any racist views in her hearing.

Tovey gave evidence emphatically telling the jury he had "never" been racist.

He claimed the lists of car registrations were of bad drivers, and said he had written terms of racial abuse on them "for the same reason I would write hooligan or yob, just a derogatory expression of anger at the time".

Tovey could face up to 14 years in jail on the explosives and guns charges.

After the case Assistant Chief Constable Sara Thornton of Thames Valley Police said Tovey wanted to cause considerable harm and damage, particularly to members of ethnic minorities.

"We believe that Tovey intended to cause considerable harm and damage to the community and in particular member of minority communities.

"Carterton is a small town with a low crime rate, not the sort of place you would expect to find a man like Tovey.

"But this case proves that no matter where they hide, individuals like Tovey will be found and rooted out in the Thames Valley."

Judge Mary Jane Mowat adjourned sentencing for three weeks while a psychiatric report was prepared.

Tovey was remanded in custody until his next appearance.

At a press conference after the case, Assistant Chief Constable Thornton compared Tovey to Hungerford massacre gunman Michael Ryan and nail bomber David Copeland.

But she added: "I don't know what Tovey had in his mind.

"But I think the fortunate thing in this case compared with Copeland and Ryan is that we got to him before he got to anyone else."

Detective Superintendent Steve Morrison, who led the investigation, said officers would never fully know how close Tovey had come to using the weapons.

But he added: "We are not psychologists but to my mind, something could have happened in that man's life which to most of us would be pretty trivial but to him, it would cause him to take umbrage and use this stuff that was available to him."

He described the horrifying array of weapons Tovey had collected including British Army PE4 plastic explosives.

"PE4 would be more than capable of turning a vehicle over its head and probably would cause substantial damage to a reasonable-sized building," he said.

Police discovered videos giving guidelines on how to make napalm, construct nail bombs and manufacture various others munitions, he said.

But it was still not known where most of the arms had come from.

"The issue there, if we look at the wars around Europe, that material would have been used by the British Army and by lots of other people and that could have been brought back to this country that way.

"We have made a lot of inquiries into the origins of that PE4.

"But it is not something we are abandoning, we are still trying to find out where that piece of explosive came from."

Mr Morris added that Tovey did not appear to be affiliated to any extreme right-wing groups such as Combat 18.

He said: "I think he is a man working alone through ridiculous racist views."

Asked how it was possible that a potentially violent racist like Tovey could have so many black girlfriends and an Asian wife, he said: "It's not inconceivable that people can have extreme, ridiculous racist views but still have in their mind that kind of power that having a black girlfriends gives them."

Detectives showed some of the books found in Tovey's house. They included the Vigilante Handbook, the Death Dealer's Manual, the Poisoner's Handbook, the Black Book of Arson, the Black Book of Booby Traps and the Revenge Encyclopaedia.